A combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the European ban on dog and cat fur trade

Alessia Mariacher; Luisa Garofalo; Rita Fanelli; Rita Lorenzini; Rosario Fico

doi:10.7717/peerj.7955

A combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the European ban on dog and cat fur trade

PeerJ. 2019 Nov 11:7:e7955. doi: 10.7717/peerj.7955. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Alessia Mariacher¹, Luisa Garofalo², Rita Fanelli², Rita Lorenzini², Rosario Fico¹

Affiliations

¹ Centro di Referenza Nazionale per la Medicina Forense Veterinaria, Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Regioni Lazio e Toscana, Grosseto, Italy.
² Centro di Referenza Nazionale per la Medicina Forense Veterinaria, Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Regioni Lazio e Toscana, Rieti, Italy.

Abstract

Animal furs are encountering more and more the detriment of public opinion, that is increasingly sensitive to animals, their welfare and protection. The feeling of outrage against animal suffering is particularly intense when cats and dogs are involved, since these are the most popular pets in Western countries. However, in some Asian countries breeding of dogs and cats for the fur industry is a common practice. These furs and their finished garments are often mislabelled in order to be imported and sold to unaware consumers in Western countries. The European Union has issued the Regulation 1523/2007, which bans the use and trade of dog and cat furs. The main purposes of the Regulation were to normalise the internal market and to address the concerns of European consumers about the risk of inadvertently buying products containing these species. The Regulation states that several analytical methods (microscopy, DNA testing and mass spectrometry) can be used to exclude dogs and cats as source species, but an official analytical protocol was not provided. In this paper, we report on the development of a reliable and affordable method for species identification in furs, based on a combined morphological and molecular approach. Our protocol provides an initial morphological analysis as a time and cost effective screening test. Only samples that are morphologically not excluded as canid/felid furs, based on few selected microscopic features, are then submitted to DNA testing. The application of this protocol on seized furs reached 92% identification of species. Our approach assists in identifying frauds and reinforcing the ban on dog and cat fur trade, allowing (1) rapid inexpensive recognition of fake furs, (2) exclusion of non-canid/non-felid furs through fast microscopic morphological screening, (3) overall cost reduction with lower number of samples to be submitted to DNA analysis, (4) analytical protocol to stand in court in case criminal sanctions are to be applied.

Keywords: Canis lupus; Felis silvestris; Genetic analysis; Hair morphology; Illegal trade; Microscopy; Veterinary forensics.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by funds from the Italian Ministry of Health (RC LT 1311). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.