Today I was looking at a web site which sold leather belts — the kind for Real Men. You know the kind: big, hefty belts made to hold guns, not just pants.
One type of belt was touted as being made of “bull” leather, not just “cow” leather, marketing this as being “better” because the bull is full of testosterone, which (according to the web site, but not any other source I can find online) makes for better leather. I had a question here: one cannot keep mass amounts of bulls easily. They fight, and they are dangerous. Where is the store behind this web site getting a bunch of bull skins to make these belts? Who is keeping bulls to maturity and then skinning them? And what are they going to do with all that testosterone-tainted meat afterwards? (Testosterone makes the meat darker and less desirable.)
Perhaps they are just using regular leather — even castrated steers are regularly treated with synthetic testosterone to improve meat yield.
The same company also makes “elephant belts”, which to my horror are made from actual elephant skin. The site insists they deal only with “legal importers” of elephant hide, which led me to wonder: Where do you find a “legal importer” of parts of an animal it is illegal to kill? This one surprised me: it appears to be legal to hunt elephants, provided you have the right permits, at least in some parts of Africa, and in theory the “tourism” trade that’s generating is good for the locals and even, possibly, in some roundabout way, the elephants. Um, that’s great…maybe…but I’m still not buying a belt made of elephant skin.
On a related note, the other day I was at a zoo which had a “touch tank” full of dogfish sharks, and it occurred to me that the zoo probably did not have its own dog shark breeding operation. Where might be the easiest place for a facility to get large quantities of a shark bred for “animal fodder, fertilizer, and research”?
I’ve walked past “touch tanks” for more than thirty years. Only now am I wondering where they get all these animals (and it seems likely they have high turnover in those tanks). A facility at which I worked once (against their own better judgement) bought display animals from a fur farm. Where is your local zoo getting their critters, and sending their surplus? Where is your “legal supplier” of elephant skin getting their material? It’s just an important question to keep in mind: what other industry may I be indirectly supporting by purchasing this product?
Animalfeasance 