With Christmas presents to buy, and Christmas parties to dress up for, you might be tempted to purchase a hat, bag or accessory with a beautiful, colourful pom-pom attached. Most of these pom-poms are made with faux, or fake, fur.

They are amazingly realistic, and soft and silky to touch, but be warned - some of them are made from real fur.

It’s hard to believe that real fur is being sold for as little as £3 per item, and because it’s such good value many people assume that the fur can’t possibly be real.

To make matters worse, the labelling inside the products can be misleading, or even non-existent.

Here are some items recently found for sale on the island: a knitted hat with a real marmot fur bobble costing £3.50; a handbag charm/keyring pom-pom made from rabbit fur costing £5; a parka with real raccoon dog fur trim around the hood priced at £35.

Because the wearing of real fur coats became so socially unacceptable several years ago, most of us just assume that real fur clothing is no longer an issue.

But it is. A BBC Watchdog investigation found that several well-known high street retailers have been selling real fur, even though they have ’no fur policies’ in place.

Eighty-five per cent of the fur industry’s skins come from animals kept on fur factory farms.

The fur farm industry is notorious for the terrible conditions its animals live in.

Racoon dogs, marmots, mink, foxes and rabbits are kept in tiny, barren cages until they are big enough to yield the maximum amount of fur.

Many die a horrible death from disease, stress, self-mutilation and cannibalism before they are slaughtered and skinned. It’s factory farming at its worst.

Although fur farming is banned in the UK, it is not illegal to import fur from other countries like China and Canada.

We can all do our bit to make the trade less profitable by ensuring we don’t mistakenly buy real fur. If it feels too good to be fake, then it probably is!

There are two things you can do to test whether fur is real or fake:

â?¢Look at the tips of the fur. If they are pointed then the fur is probably real, because fake fur usually has rounded or blunt tips; and

Inspect the base of the fur. You should be able to see a woven or fabric base if the fur is fake, and if it’s real the base will look like skin (which, of course, it is).

If you have already made your purchase in good faith, but then suspect you may have purchased real fur, you could try the ’burn test’.

If you carefully set light to a strand or two of real fur it will singe like human hair, but fake fur will simply melt.

If you have been mis-sold a product in this way, take it back to the retailer and let them know, and encourage them to remove any other similar items from sale.

The Humane Society has been lobbying the UK Government for some time about banning the importation of fur.

It is also calling for more regulation around labelling so that consumers can have the confidence they need to buy fake fur. You can find out more by visiting their website www.hsi.org.

And if you like the feel of real fur, then why not pop along to Ard Jerkyll and meet the cats, kittens, rabbits and guinea pigs we have here?

They’re all looking for new homes.

Alfie, the guinea pig, actually looks like a handbag accessory with his long fluffy coat.

He recently lost his life-long companion and so is now seeking a new best friend to cuddle up to and play with

Alfie is unneutered and so his new companion will need to be another boy.