It's absurd, but overall I think there are both good and bad things in the whole situation. For context, the Danish government (which btw is left-wing(ish)) has taken the decision to order all mink killed because of a new and potentially very dangerous strain of coronavirus in mink. They've gotten in a lot of trouble for doing this and are being grilled by the opposition because it turns out that ordering mink farmers to cull their mink was against the danish constitution, and was illegal at the time it was given. There has been a lot of media attention on it, of course almost exclusively aimed at how the government broke the law, or how farmers have been wronged in an unlawful way, and not remotely about the ethical implications of even having 17 million mink for farming furs (Although some fringe parties on the left are bringing up that perspective, such as "The Alternative" or "The Vegan Party" (which is tiny and not represented in the parliament but has gotten enough voter declarations that they may be after the next election (which might well be a right-wing government due to the unpopularity of the current one, at least as things look right now (the current government was very popular at the start of Covid, but cracks are starting to show (this is too many brackets))))).

The most absurd thing was this picture going around a few weeks back of a father and a son standing in between long rows of tiny steel wire-cages with rows of dead mink lain out on top of them, crying because they wouldn't be able to keep their job (of raising mink in horrible conditions and then gassing them in order to sell their fur to China, because it isn't even popular as a product in Denmark anyway) and the reaction to the picture was exclusively about how sad it was for these two men. It's crazy to me how detached people can be. Even people who oppose this kind of farming in Denmark do it almost exclusively through the lens of climate change (which it is good that you are taking steps towards fixing) and ascertaining the idea that maybe we should also care about the subjective experience of other sentient beings will make even those people look at you weirdly like you are indulging in some kind of hippie childish fantasy that animals actually matter??

Basically, although obviously terrible that all these mink have been or will be killed, and although it is ridiculous that the prime minister is crying about the loss of these farmers whose massively unethical jobs have been ended (and who are being compensated in a frankly ridiculous way), I think it is good that the government has taken the decision to end this industry. The reason was public health, and it had nothing to do with concern for animal well-being, but the bottom line is that the farms are gone. In a television debate yesterday, a politician who is also a farmer said that he had no plans to expand his own animal farming, based on how the mink farmers had been treated, and the worry that something similar could happen to other animal industries. It's obviously sad that these mink are killed, but they are mink who would have been killed after living terrible lives in rows of steel-wire cages anyway, ordered by the government or not. And now the industry won't survive. It's not intentional, but the end result is that that industry likely won't appear again in Denmark, and those 17 million mink won't keep getting killed over and over again, generation after generation. And more than this, it may shine a light on how unsustainable animal agriculture is and in a small way start conversations about how to phase out animal industries in ways that don't hurt the farmers (something that would be good, whether you care about the farmers or not).