You’d think that leather is basically a free byproduct of the beef industry. McDonalds, Wendys, and Burger King alone slaughter enough cows annually to keep us all in shoes. Add in steakhouses, grocery stores and all the other dead cows. That must be millions of hides annually just in the production of tasty beef.
But, leather is very expensive. Two hundred bucks at least for a quality leather jacket. The cost of a leather car interior (remember those Corinthian Leather commercials Ricardo Montalban did 35 years ago?) Try paying for that today. Want to buy a leather sofa? You better save up a long, long time.
Oddly enough leather consumption seems to be in decline. I haven’t owned a real leather jacket in 20 years. Most of my shoes are some kind of man made product. I have a couple pairs of leather dress shoes in the closet.
Are all the hides from all those Big Macs on Hooves just getting thrown away?
My best guess was: it’s expensive to process, perhaps moreso than synthetic fibers or cotton/linen/wool. Unlike cotton, linen and wool, there’s only so much leather per cow. Once you eat the cow, you’ve got to grow another one to get more leather. I’m guessing it’s more expensive to grow cows than cotton or flax. Sheep just get shorn and grow more wool, so they are cost effective. (I wonder why we don’t eat more mutton and lamb in this country – sheep seem so much more cost efficient and productive compared to cows, but I digress.)
Anyway, I thought surely there’s more to it, and then I found this. And this.
The vast majority of steers butchered to create meat for McDonald’s and pretty much everybody else are the product of stockyard feeding practices. Meaning, they’re crammed into a pen their entire lives, fed corn three times a day, and spend their entire lives ankle-deep in their own poop. The hides of these steers is covered in poop & other unsavory substances and it’s everything the modern meat processing industry can do to separate the skin from the meat without contamination. You would not want to use leather from one of these guys.
You use that leather every day. Just like you use plywood, pencils, shampoo, deodorant, cellophane, car polish, paint, air filters, plastics, and any number of other products rendered from cattle carcasses.
After watching the linked video above I can’t agree with this. The processing of the hides undergo many, many steps that would ensure the end product is acceptable.
True, and I bet most cowhides aren’t leather-quality anyway. Do slaughterhouses have people who examine the hides (from other animals too) to determine this? That’s a serious question.
My vote goes to the one where he was castrating newborn lambs with his teeth. :eek:
A surprising number of people believe that sheep, alpacas, etc. are killed for their fiber. No, they aren’t, except for shearling which is a variation of leather, with the hair attached.
