Leather. It comes in the form of jackets, footwear, bags, wallets, belts, furniture, car seats, the list goes on... We see the price tags, but we don't see what it cost the animal it came from, the person who killed them, or the person who turned their skin into the item on the rack. 

We're told it's natural, ethical, environmentally friendly, and a responsible use of something that would otherwise go to waste. 

But the true story of leather... from the luxury leather handbags made in sweatshops carrying 'Made in Italy' labels, the children spending their days making leather shoes instead of going to school, the leather tannery workers developing lung, pancreas, and nasal cancers from chromium exposure, and the toxic chromium-laden tannery wastewater dumped into rivers... to the billion-dollar Indian leather industry built from the skins of cattle whose slaughter is illegal, the 'spent' and pregnant dairy cows hanging upside-down in Australian slaughterhouses, and the environmental science the leather industry tried to bury... is a story that the leather industry will never tell you.

Leather is a visible product, carried on shoulders, laced onto feet, sat upon in cars, and seen on social media, in advertisements, and in shop windows every day. Research on social norms suggests that people draw behavioural cues from what they see around them. When leather is all around us, with no acknowledgement of the cruelty behind it, it signals that buying it is normal and uncontroversial.

The material itself is the skin of an animal who was slaughtered, then chemically treated to prevent it from decomposing (in a process that can cause cancer in the workers who handle it, and which pollutes the environment). The industry behind it all is driven by consumer demand.

Every time you choose a vegan alternative over animal skin leather, that purchase reaches back through the entire supply chain... from the artificial insemination of animals on farms, to their final day of life on the slaughterhouse floor... to the staff working with toxic chemicals, tanning the animals' skins. When you buy leather, you contribute to the demand that keeps it all running. When you stop, you withdraw your contribution. And when enough people do the same, the breeding, confining, and killing of animals becomes less profitable and less incentivised, and we get one step closer to a kinder and more sustainable world.