Isn't wool/leather just a byproduct, no animal dies for it?
Short answer: Leather is a co-product that helps pay for the slaughter, and wool's 'haircut' involves mulesing and ends at the same abattoir.
A byproduct is near-worthless waste. The hide is a revenue line, and when margins are this thin, it can be the difference between killing at a profit and not killing at all.
Material Innovation Initiative (citing Dr Catherine Tubb)
The objection
“The animal died for meat anyway. The skin and fleece are just byproducts, using them prevents waste.”
The answer
A byproduct is near-worthless waste. Leather is something else entirely: a co-product, a significant revenue stream that helps make raising and killing the animal profitable in the first place. Buying leather isn’t salvaging a leftover. You’re paying into the slaughter’s business model and helping fund the next animal’s death. The word “byproduct” exists to launder that transaction. If hides genuinely had no value, no one would tan them at industrial scale.
Wool comes wrapped in a gentler story, the harmless haircut, which leaves out most of the life. Sheep have been bred to grow far more fleece than is natural, which invites heat stress and flystrike; the standard preventive in Australia is mulesing, slicing flesh from a lamb’s hindquarters, frequently without anaesthetic. The haircut also doesn’t end at the salon. Wool sheep are not spared slaughter: when fleece yield drops, they’re sold for meat, many of them via live export in conditions that kill animals in transit. The shearing-shed image shows five minutes of the animal’s life and hides the rest.
So neither material is a leftover. Both are revenue lines in the same business, and both end at the same abattoir.
There’s also the simple, unglamorous point underneath: these are someone’s body parts, taken without consent, for products we have abundant alternatives to.
The skin helps pay for the killing, so it was never really a byproduct. And the “haircut” requires breeding an animal into disease before sending it to the slaughterhouse, so the wool was never free either.