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Every time you choose to buy
a leather jacket or leather shoes, you sentence
animals to a lifetime of suffering. Buying leather
directly contributes to factory farms and
slaughterhouses, since the skins of animals are
the most economically important coproduct of the
multibillion-dollar meat industry. The vast
majority of animals slaughtered for their skin
suffer all the horrors of factory farming-intense
confinement, painful mutilations, deprivation,
harmful hormone and antibiotic injections, and
cruel treatment during transport and slaughter.
Cattle
Leather
from cows comes from animals raised for both beef
and milk. Cattle raised for beef spend most of
their lives on overcrowded feedlots. Studies have
found that ranchers maximize profits by giving
each steer less than 20 square feet of living
space-the equivalent of putting 12 half-ton steers
in a typical American bedroom! They are subjected
to painful procedures like castration; branding,
which causes third-degree burns; tail-docking; and
dehorning - all without painkillers. Deprived of
veterinary care, exposed to the elements with no
shelter, these breathing, thinking, feeling
beings, who feel pain just as we do, suffer
immensely. Instead of treating them humanely, they
are fed a steady diet of hormones to fatten them
and antibiotics to keep them alive.
Dairy
Cows
Cows
raised for milk are typically confined to crowded
concrete-floored milking pens, where they are
milked by machines that often cut or shock them.
Some farmers inject cows with synthetic growth
hormones, which increase the likelihood of
mastitis, a painful infection in the cows' udders.
They are repeatedly impregnated, only to have
every baby torn from their side shortly after
birth. Both calf and mother cow, powerfully bonded
by maternal love, are known to cry out desperately
for days when separated. The cows' female
offspring are forced to become future "milk
machines," and their frightened male calves
are trucked to veal farms where they are chained
inside tiny, dark crates. Motherless and alone,
they are unable to take even one step in any
direction, turn around, or lie down comfortably.
When they are slaughtered, they are often too sick
or lame to walk.
Transport
After
short dismal lives, cows are jam-packed into metal
trucks where, confused and terrified, they suffer
from injury, freezing cold and blistering heat,
overcrowding, hunger, and thirst. In the winter,
cows routinely arrive for slaughter frozen to the
sides of transport trucks, frozen to truck bottoms
in their own feces and urine, and injured or dead
from the journey. Frequently collapsing during
their hellish ride, many cows arrive at the
slaughterhouse unable to walk off the backs of
transport trucks and are instead dragged off with
chains-bones breaking as they hit the ground.
Slaughter
Every year, 35.7 million cows
are stunned, hung upside down, bled to death, and
skinned in slaughterhouses. The federal Humane
Slaughter Act stipulates that cows should be
stunned by a mechanical blow to the head and
rendered unconscious before they are strung up,
but the high speed of assembly lines that often
process up to 400 cows per hour results in the
improper stunning, each year, of millions of cows,
who are consequently skinned and dismembered while
they are still kicking and crying out in terror.
Cows are not the only animals who are raised for
their skins. Millions of other animals are also
victims of the cruel trade.
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