Fashion
Most of the fur on trashy boots or the collars on tacky jackets come from fur farms where furry animals are kept in tiny, filthy cages for years. They spend their entire miserable lives standing on floors made of thin wires, never having a chance to jump, dig or play. Life on a fur farm is obviously no picnic! Instead it’s a living hell. The way these animals die would break your heart- some are killed by having their necks broken or their skulls beaten in and others are killed by anal or vaginal electrocution. Some animals even wake up while their skin is being ripped off their bodies.
Trapping animals for their fur isn’t any better. When the traps shut, animals are strangled beaten, crushed or drowned to death. Sometimes trapped animals become so dehydrated or desperate to return to their babies that they chew off their own limbs in an attempt to escape- only to die later from blood loss or gangrene. As if that weren’t bad enough, in Asia even dogs and cats are cruelly killed for their fur, much of which is cruelly labelled as rabbit fur before it is exported around the world. Look out: that ‘rabbit’ fur trim on your coat might be from someone’s dog or cat! Animals like their fur. They don’t want to die so that someone else can wear it. Can you blame them?
If cows could talk, they’d probably ask you to ‘wear your own skin’. No matter how you slice it, leather is dead skin. You’ve already read how they live in farms- they suffer through painful procedures like castration and dehorning – without so much as an aspirin for the pain. You now know that the meat industry is unbelievably cruel. But did you know that selling animals’ skins for leather helps keep slaughterhouses in business? Beef isn’t as profitable a business without leather (think 79p hamburgers). So when you buy leather, you’re supporting the meat industry.
What if your leather shoes were made from cocker spaniels? Would that make a difference? Well, guess what: Some leather products are actually made from dogs and cats- and because they are generally mislabelled or not labelled at all, you could be in shoes made out of spaniels and not even know it. Now think about it: millions of cows, pigs, sheep and goats who are tortured and killed for their skins each year feel pain just as dogs and cats do. It shouldn’t matter what type of leather you’re wearing- it’s still someone else’s skin.
There’s no excuse for wearing leather once you know that many of the best sports shoes are leather-free because synthetics perform better. All the biggest shoe designers have ‘fakes’ in their lines- and buying synthetic knock-offs is a lot cheaper than the ‘real thing’. And don’t even mention jackets- if you want that look, there are dozens of animal-free choices.
