This petition is being sent to the Neiman Marcus company to request that they end their use of animal skins.
Petition for Neiman Marcus to end the use of animal skin in their products. Most leather produced and sold in the United States is made from the skins of cattle, but leather is also made from horses, sheep, lambs, and pigs who are slaughtered for meat. Other species are hunted and killed specifically for their skins, including bison, water buffaloes, boars, kangaroos, elephants, eels, sharks, dolphins, seals, walruses, frogs, turtles, crocodiles, lizards, and snakes.
We kindly ask that you put a stop to the slaughter. Animals used for their skins are treated, many animals from whom these skins are taken suffer all the horrors of factory farming, including extreme crowding and isolation, deprivation, unanesthetized castration, branding, tail-docking, and cruel treatment during transport and slaughter. Leather production also harms the environment, and the people who tan the leathers.
Long ago animal skin was air- or salt-dried and tanned with vegetable tannins or oil, but today, animal skin is turned into 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 are cyanide-based. Most leather produced in the U.S. is chrome-tanned. All wastes that contain 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.16 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.17 Studies of leather-tannery workers in Sweden and Italy found cancer risks between 20% and 50% above [those] expected.18
There are many alternative offered, 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 easy to clean.
