Every year, the global leather industry slaughters more than a billion animals.

Leather is not simply a slaughterhouse byproduct, but a booming industry. The meat industry relies on skin sales to stay in business. Buying leather directly contributes to factory farms and slaughterhouses because skin is the most economically important byproduct of the meat industry. Animals farmed for their skin are raised only to be slaughtered and skinned—many while they are still alive and struggling to get free.

Leather can be made from cows, pigs, goats, sheep, alligators, kangaroos… Dogs and cats are also slaughtered for their meat and skin in China, for example, which exports their skins around the world. And because leather is normally not labeled, you never really know where it came from.
You might actually be walking your dog right know in the park, and wear, without even realizing it, a pair of shoes or a bag made of dog skin. How fair is that?

Many of the clothing products you buy and wear involve the mistreatment, pain and deaths of millions of animals. Whenever you buy a leather product (jacket, shoes, bag, belt, wallet) you actually support animal suffering and sentence an animal to a lifetime of suffering.

Every bit of animal skin, no matter how small, represents the intense suffering of the animal that was killed to make clothing.

So next time you want to buy a pair of leather shoes just remember that the leather they are made of was actually present in a slaughterhouse, on the body of a terrified animal, as he cried out in terror and struggled and fought to live.

There’s simply no need to use animal skins when you have so many alternatives, such as faux leather.