"Label my leather"

[Astrocat]

Leather products are becoming ever cheaper in Britain largely due to imports from China and Vietnam. However, the animal welfare standards in those countries are absolutely unknown and there are many tales of cattle being battery [farmed] in warehouses.

Label My Leather is a campaign to promote British Leather, which ensures a reasonable standard of care for the cattle, as well as reducing unnecessary transportation pollution.

We are also seeking mandatory labelling on all leather products to include both the country in which the animal was reared and the country of slaughter and processing.

British Leather typically comes from overworked, exhausted dairy cows who have been treated abysmally for their entire lives..... most often in conditions comparable to battery-farms.

The standard of care which they have is far from what i would view as reasonable, and there is no evidence that buying british leather is necessarily going to cause any less pollution through transportation, than buying foreign leather.

For example, if people in Africa use African crops to raise African cows then export their skin to the UK for sale .... then that might well require less transportation, and causeless pollution, than if UK farmers import large quantities of crops (as is the case for the majority of crops used to raise UK cattle) from similar countries , in order to feed those crops to UK cattle.

It seems to me, that the animal welfare standards of the UK are absolutely unknown to many Brits, which may be why so many people assume that UK welfare standards are automatically going to better than they are in places such as China or Vietnam.