Would decreasing the consumption of leather actually reduce the number of cattle being slaughtered? I figure either one of two scenarios is the case: (1) Most leather is taken from cows who are slaughtered for food. So these cows would die whether there was demand for their skin or not. (2) Leather cows are separate from meat cows, and whether they are raised and killed depends on the demand for leather. Thus, less demand for leather = fewer dead leather cows.
Which is it?
I’m pretty sure no cattle are slaughtered primarily for their hides–not even in Corinth. That means leather comes either from cattle slaughtered for food or otherwise culled. But it isn’t as simple as saying that they would die even if no one bought leather. You have to look at the whole picture from an economic standpoint. Selling leather and other by-products provides income for meat/dairy producers. Without that source of income, the cost of beef and dairy would increase, resulting in a decrease in consumption, and fewer cattle being killed. This is precisely the way that not buying a hamburger saves cows–no specific cow is saved because you are a vegetarian, but by not buying beef you reduce the overall demand for beef by a small amount.
Of course, you also have to look at other factors. For one thing, is paying for a by-product morally the same as paying for the primary product, even if it is the same economically? For another, the Naugahyde you buy instead of leather uses petroleum and pollution-causing chemicals that would otherwise not be used. The vegetables you eat instead of beef were sprayed by pesticides and required potential habitat for animals and plants be plowed up and cultivated. (The same is true for grain fed to cattle, of course.)
Based on this, the idea has occurred to me that the most ethical diet would consist of organ meats and offal–since demand for these is low, it is safe to say that no cattle are slaughtered for these products, and the revenue stream from them has to be relatively inconsequential. Something was killed so you could eat a salad or a burger, but when you eat a plate of chorizo sausage (made from a cow’s salivary glands), you’re essentially getting a free meal from what would otherwise have been thrown away or fed to pets.
Leather is a byproduct of beef production most of the time. I’ve heard about a farmer here who raises cattle in an enviroment that can’t cause skin damage to the cattle (no barbed wire, everything smoothed off, no horns etc). The resulting hides are blemish-free. Of course quiet stress-free cattle are the most tasty as well, so it’s not like the meat is tossed away; AFAIK he gets a premium for the beef too.
Dave
This is not necessarily so. Feed grain does not have the same quality requirements as food-grade grain. Similarly, cattle can eat vegetation not suitable for human consumption, including that grown in areas that will not support human food crops.
The second point is true, which is why I specified grain fed to cattle, rather than cattle feed in general. Not all cattle are grain-fed, but most are at least part of the time. I suppose you could make a good case that production of grass-fed beef results in fewer individual animal deaths per pound than grain or vegetable production.
I’m not sure what your other point is. Feed grain may not be up to human consumption standards, but it still uses pesticides, and cute little field mice still get plowed up for the field.
I’m at work so I can’t do the search, but there was a really good thread in GQ on this a while back IIRC.
As part of a thread on this a while back (which quickly degenerated into a heated economics debate on whether markets are perfectly efficient or not), I found an annual government report that predicts future livestock supply/needs.
The analysis was ALL around the predicted price of meat, not a word about any other parts of the cow, including leather. I take this as a pretty good indication that leather does not influence how many animals are raised and slaughtered.
Anecdotally, a couple of contributors to the threat mentioned that they raised and sold cows on a small scale. They said that, while leather does come from the same cows that are raised for meat, they didn’t have a place to sell the hides for tanning at any price. The hide market was simply saturated by that provided by the food market.
So as long as the leather comes from an animal that’s primarily raised as food stock, it seems to have no effect on the numbers. Unless vegetarianism catches on big-time, this probably won’t change.