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

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 Weste...

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Autores principales: Mariacher, Alessia, Garofalo, Luisa, Fanelli, Rita, Lorenzini, Rita, Fico, Rosario
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6855206/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31737444
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7955
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author Mariacher, Alessia
Garofalo, Luisa
Fanelli, Rita
Lorenzini, Rita
Fico, Rosario
author_facet Mariacher, Alessia
Garofalo, Luisa
Fanelli, Rita
Lorenzini, Rita
Fico, Rosario
author_sort Mariacher, Alessia
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-68552062019-11-15 A combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the European ban on dog and cat fur trade Mariacher, Alessia Garofalo, Luisa Fanelli, Rita Lorenzini, Rita Fico, Rosario PeerJ Biodiversity 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. PeerJ Inc. 2019-11-11 /pmc/articles/PMC6855206/ /pubmed/31737444 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7955 Text en © 2019 Mariacher et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Biodiversity
Mariacher, Alessia
Garofalo, Luisa
Fanelli, Rita
Lorenzini, Rita
Fico, Rosario
A combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the European ban on dog and cat fur trade
title A combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the European ban on dog and cat fur trade
title_full A combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the European ban on dog and cat fur trade
title_fullStr A combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the European ban on dog and cat fur trade
title_full_unstemmed A combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the European ban on dog and cat fur trade
title_short A combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the European ban on dog and cat fur trade
title_sort combined morphological and molecular approach for hair identification to comply with the european ban on dog and cat fur trade
topic Biodiversity
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6855206/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31737444
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7955
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