Most people are astonished to learn that many of the clothing fibers they consider harmless actually involve the mistreatment, pain, and deaths of millions of animals.
With so many wonderful alternatives to leather, fur, and wool, there's simply no need
to use animal skins to cover your own skin. Join kind people everywhere and help prevent unnecessary animal suffering — wear compassionate, animal-free clothing!
LEATHER
What's wrong with leather? When you buy a leather jacket or leather shoes, you
support animal suffering.
Millions of cows, pigs, sheep, and goats are slaughtered for their skin every year.
Leather is not simply a slaughterhouse byproduct
— it's a booming industry. The meat industry relies on skin sales to stay in business. In fact, skin accounts for approximately 50% of the total byproduct value of cattle.
Nearly all the animals who end up as belts and shoes suffer intensive confinement, branding, unanesthetized castration, tail-docking, dehorning, and cruel treatment
during transportation and slaughter.
FUR
The facts on fur are simple. The fur industry would like you to believe that fur is a fabric, but actually it's skin ripped or peeled off the backs of animals.
Every piece of fur is the result of horrific cruelty.
Animals trapped for their fur can suffer for hours or days in traps, chewing through their own feet in a desperate attempt to escape. More than four million wild animals are trapped and killed each year in the U.S. On fur farms, millions more live their entire lives in tiny, barren, wire mesh cages where they may literally go insane before they are gassed, anally electrocuted,
clubbed to death or have their necks broken.
Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, there is no reason to wear fur. Synthetic fabrics that are warmer and lighter than fur have eliminated the need for fur apparel.
WOOL
What's wrong with wool? Most people don't know that sheep raised for wool are often mutilated and castrated without painkillers, shipped thousands of miles
with little access to food and water, and slaughtered while fully conscious.
When sheep age and their wool production declines, they are of no use to wool farmers and so are discarded for slaughter.
Millions of sheep discarded by the Australian wool industry are shipped to the Middle East for slaughter every year. They are packed onto enormous, multitiered ships where severe overcrowding causes many to be trampled to death or to starve when they cannot reach food and water troughs.
Sick or injured sheep may be thrown overboard to drown or be eaten by sharks or tossed alive into shipboard grinders. For those who survive the grueling weeks- or months-long voyage in filthy, disease-ridden conditions,
their final destination is frequently a country with minimal slaughter regulations. Here they have their throats slit without being stunned first, and in many cases regain consciousness while being dismembered.
There are fashionable, durable, and warm alternatives to wool available virtually everywhere that clothes are sold. Wool products tend to be harder to care for, heavier, prone to shrinking, and not as durable.
DOWN AND SILK
Each year, the down and silk industries exploit millions of geese, ducks, silkworms, spiders, and other animals, causing unnecessary pain and suffering for these sometimes tiny, often complex, feeling beings.
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