PARAGRAPH 2 PETAS FOCUSES OF ATTENTION.
A) THE CLOTHING TRADE - Leather: Animals Abused And Killed for Their Skins
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Every year, the global leather industry slaughters more than a billion animals and tans their skins and hides. Many animals from whom these skins are taken suffer all the horrors of factory farming, including extreme crowding and confinement, deprivation, unanesthetized castration, branding, tail-docking, dehorning, and cruel treatment during transport and slaughter.
High Byproduct Value
The multibillion-dollar meat industry profits from more than just the animals flesh. The byproducts of meat consumption include fats and blood that are used in livestock feed, tires, explosives, paints, and cosmetics; organs that are used in pet food; and heart valves that are used in the pharmaceutical industry. The skin of the animal, however, represents the most economically important byproduct of the meat packing industry.
When dairy cows production declines, their skin is also made into leather; the hides of their offspring, veal calves, are made into high-priced calfskin. Thus, the economic success of the slaughterhouse and the dairy farm is directly linked to the sale of leather goods.
Other Animals Slaughtered for Skins
Most leather produced and sold in the United States is made from the skins of cattle and calves, but leather is also made from horses, sheep, lambs, goats, and pigs who are slaughtered for meat. Other species are hunted and killed specifically for their skins, including zebras, bison, water buffaloes, boars, kangaroos, elephants, eels, sharks, dolphins, seals, walruses, frogs, turtles, crocodiles, lizards, and snakes.
Other exotic animals, such as alligators, are factory-farmed for their skins and meat. Young alligators may be kept in tanks above ground, while the bigger animals live in pools half-sunken into concrete slabs. According to Floridas regulations, as many as 350 6-foot alligators may legally inhabit a space the size of a typical family home. One Georgia farmer had 10,000 alligators living in four buildings, where hundreds and hundreds of alligators fill every inch of each room, according to the Los Angeles Times. Although alligators may naturally live up to 60 years, on farms they are usually butchered before the age of 2, as soon as they reach 4 to 6 feet in length. Humane treatment is not a priority of those who poach and hunt animals to obtain their skin or those who transform skin into leather. Alligators on farms may be beaten to death with hammers and axes, sometimes remaining conscious and in agony for up to two hours after being skinned.
Kangaroos are slaughtered by the millions every year, their skins considered to be prime material for soccer shoes. Although the Australian government requires hunters to shoot the animals, orphaned joeys and wounded adults are, according to government code, to be decapitated or hit sharply on the head to destroy the brain. Snakes and lizards may be skinned alive because of the belief that live flaying imparts suppleness to the finished leather. Kid goats may be boiled alive to make kid gloves, and the skins of unborn calves and lambssome purposely aborted, others from slaughtered pregnant cows and ewesare considered especially luxurious.
Shearling, contrary to what many consumers think, is not sheared wool; the term refers to a yearling sheep who has been shorn once. A shearling garment is made from a sheep or lamb shorn shortly before slaughter; the skin is tanned with the wool still on it.
Animals used to produce leather in other countries often suffer horribly as well. A PETA investigation into cattle slaughter in India, where many mistakenly believe that cows are revered, revealed that old cows are sold at auction and then marched long distances to illegal transport trucks. Often sick and injured from the grueling march, as many as 50 cattle are crammed into trucks designed to hold no more than a dozen animals. They are then driven over rutted roads, all the while goring and trampling each other, to ancient slaughterhouses where all four feet are bound together and their throats are slit.
Hundreds of thousands of dog and cat skins are traded in Europe each year (with an estimated 2 million killed in China to meet the demand), but many are bought unknowingly by consumers since the products made from dog and cat fur are often mislabeled and do not accurately indicate their origin. In France, more than 20,000 cats are stolen for the skin trade annually; during a police raid on a tannery in Deux-Svres, 1,500 skins, used to make baby shoes, were seized. When you buy leather products, you may unknowingly be purchasing leather from dog and cat tanneries.
Tannery Toxins
Although leather makers like to tout their products as biodegradable and eco-friendly, the process of tanning stabilizes the collagen or protein fibers so that they actually stop biodegrading.
Until the late 1800s, animal skin was air- or salt-dried and tanned with vegetable tannins or oil, but today animal skin is turned into finished leather with a variety of much more dangerous substances, including mineral salts, formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives, and various oils, dyes, and finishes, some of them cyanide-based.
Most leather produced in the U.S. is chrome-tanned. All wastes containing chromium are considered hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency. In addition to the toxic substances mentioned above, tannery effluent also contains large amounts of other pollutants, such as protein, hair, salt, lime sludge, sulfides, and acids.
Among the disastrous consequences of this noxious waste is the threat to human health from the highly elevated levels of lead, cyanide, and formaldehyde in the groundwater near tanneries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the incidence of leukemia among residents in an area surrounding one tannery in Kentucky was five times the national average. Arsenic, a common tannery chemical, has long been associated with lung cancer in workers who are exposed to it on a regular basis. Several studies have established links between sinus and lung cancers and the chromium used in tanning. Studies of leather-tannery workers in Sweden and Italy found cancer risks between 20% and 50% above those expected.
Raising animals whose skins eventually become leather creates waste and pollution. Huge amounts of fossil fuels are consumed in livestock production. (By contrast, plastic wearables account for only a fraction of the petroleum used in the U.S.) Trees are cleared to create pastureland, vast quantities of water are used, and feedlot and dairy-farm runoff are a major source of water pollution. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, tanneries have largely shifted operations worldwide from developed to undeveloped nations, where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are lax.
Alternatives
There are many alternatives to leather, including cotton, linen, rubber, ramie, canvas, and synthetics. Chlorenol (called Hydrolite by Avia and Durabuck by Nike), used in athletic and hiking shoes, is an exciting new material thats perforated for breatheability, stretches around the foot with the same give as leather, gives good support, and is machine-washable.
Vegan shoes and accessories are inexpensive, and some are even made from recycled materials.
B) LAB RESEAECH - Chimpanzees: Our Closest Living Relatives
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Chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas. Chimpanzees and humans share the same blood types and have at least 95 percent genetic similarity. These highly intelligent animals have long childhoods, cooperate with and learn from each other, participate in cultural and social activities such as dancing in the rain, make and use tools, and even learn sign language if given the opportunity to do so.
Endangered Species in Decline
Once home to at least a million chimpanzees, Africa now has a chimpanzee population of only 250,000 because their habitats continue to be threatened by commercial and agricultural development and because they are hunted for meat. The Jane Goodall Institute estimates that 5,000 chimpanzees are killed by poachers annually. Orphaned chimps are taken for the pet trade. Both species of chimpanzees, pan paniscus and pan troglodytes, are listed as endangered species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Red List. The U.S. Department of the Interior also lists them as endangered and threatened.
Victims of Research
There are approximately 2,400 captive chimpanzees in the United States, 1,700 of whom are used in research. Eight federally funded research centers use primates, including chimpanzees, as models to study AIDS, hepatitis, cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, leprosy, heart disease, and other human health problemseven though chimpanzees would never contract these ailments under normal circumstances. Most other captive chimpanzees in the U.S. are confined to zoos or used and abused in the entertainment industry. Only about 500 live in sanctuaries.
The federal governments National Institutes of Health (NIH) officially oversees the use of chimpanzees in experiments through its Chimpanzee Management Program (ChiMP), which funds the chimpanzee colonies used in NIHs Chimpanzee Biomedical Research Program. The governments track record is appalling. In 1993, an NIH-funded chimpanzee colony passed into the hands of the Coulston Foundation, whichafter decades of serious complaintswas charged by the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with violations of the Good Laboratory Practices and the minimum standards of the federal Animal Welfare Act.(9,10) In 2000, NIH took ownership of nearly half the Coulston chimpanzees, and in 2001, NIH finally made the decision to completely discontinue its financial support of Coulston. Coulston subsequently went out of business.
CHIMP Act
In the 1980s, the NIH began an intensive breeding program to supply chimpanzees for AIDS and HIV research, only to find that chimpanzees do not contract human AIDS. Under pressure from animal-protection groups, ChiMP passed the CHIMP Act, which established a system of sanctuaries for government-owned chimpanzees who were no longer needed for federally funded research protocols. But even this does not offer protection for chimpanzees, as experimenters were able to successfully amend the CHIMP Act to allow them to continue to experiment on "retired" chimpanzees.
