Why Vegans don't wear Leather- and Vegetarians Shouldn't..

  I was vegetarian for 10 years before I became vegan and throughout that time I wore leather shoes, and didn't think too much about it. I became vegetarian when I was a child because I loved animals and didn't want to be responsible for their suffering and painful deaths, and for 10 years I felt as tho' I was doing all that I could do to help animals. Like many people who give up eating meat for reasons of compassion, I imagined that animals were killed purely for meat and that leather was merely a by product, and therefore, I guess, there seemed no particularly compelling reason to stop wearing leather shoes.
  I remember a couple of years before I became vegan I was criticised for wearing leather by a particularly argumentative meat eater. I remember repeatedly saying to him 'Well, at least I'm doing SOMETHING to help save animals- what are you doing?'- and that, I think, is the problem with vegetarianism: it gives you complacency: if you are a vegetarian you feel that you are doing something good for animals, and you feel somehow 'above' criticism, especially from meat eaters. I am truly not saying that unkindly; I know that most vegetarians, like me, adopted their diets with the very best of intentions; I'm just saying that, if you are doing it because you want to help the suffering and torment of animals, then you need to do more!
  I am going to talk about dairy, wool etc another time, but today I am talking about leather! 
  These are the reasons why you should not wear leather:
1. Firstly, leather is NOT a by product of the meat industry. The skin of the cow which dies horribly in a slaughterhouse, is an important commodity in its own right, being worth up to 15% of the total value of the whole carcase, so clearly the cow is being killed for her skin as well as her flesh, cartilage, hooves etc.
  The aggregate value of world leather production is £28 billion, according to the Vegan Society, which is actually higher than that of meat production, so without leather 'underwriting' the cost of meat, meat would clearly be significantly more expensive, and, one imagines, demand would decrease, so buying leather, is actually, supporting the meat industry. 
   2. A significant amount of 'raw hide' comes from developing countries where there may be no animal welfare laws or no enforcement of welfare laws- the conditions in unregulated slaughterhouses in India and China are truly horrifying. 
  3. The tanning industry is an environmental disaster: over 250 different chemicals are used in the tanning process, only 15%  of which are retained in the finished leather, the other 85% has to be dealt with as waste. Toxic substances used include arsenic, chromium and cyanide.
4. An extremely high input of water is needed for processing skins into leather: unbelievably 8000 litres of water are needed to produce just ONE pair of leather shoes. Actually, that could be a very conservative estimate: one cow skin will produce 18 pairs of leather shoes, and if you then include the water used to rear the cow, in the slaughterhouse, and to process her skin into leather, then each pair of shoes is then responsible for the use of over 1.4 MILLION litres of water. 
  It's worth remembering that because of the difficulties of dealing with all the toxic waste in developed countries with stringent regulations about waste disposal, much of the tanning and processing is outsourced to developing countries with fewer, or unenforced, regulations about toxic waste disposal. This has implications for the workers in the tanning and processing industries as well as of the local populations, particularly as many of the substances used are known carcinogens.
  5. I can't really see why, knowing all this, anyone would WANT to buy a pair of leather shoes. If this doesn't convince you, please just remember that the leather in a pair of shoes was actually present in an actual slaughterhouse, on the body of a terrified animal, as they cried out in terror, and struggled and fought to live: their life just as precious and valuable to them as your own. 

  if you wear leather shoes, then your shoes were present and were part of the reason, when that truly unique being, a thinking, feeling, loving being, as capable of joy, sadness and fear as you are yourself; the only one exactly like it that ever lived; somebody's child, possibly somebody's mother, lost their fight to live, and died in fear, squalor, and terrible pain. 
  And it is very possible that the skin, for your leather shoes, was removed before the animal was actually dead.


  We think that matters; that's why we don't wear leather. We are vegans because we think we should stop eating, wearing, experimenting on, and USING animals for ANYTHING! If you are not vegan, please go vegan. 
  Please support our vegan lifestyle by buying from our shop VegaNation at www.veganation.co.uk. Thank you very much.