NEW BALANCE PHASES OUT KANGAROO LEATHER
New Balance is the latest athletic company to ditch kangaroo leather. That leaves Adidas as the sole outlier among the world’s biggest athletic footwear makers. Kangaroo leather is commonly used to make soccer cleats. New Balance told the Center for a Humane Economy, a Washington, D.C.-based animal welfare organization, that it will phase out the use of kangaroo hides and stop selling shoes made with them by December 2024. The organization launched a “Kangaroos Are Not Shoes” campaign three years ago to pressure big athletic shoe brands to abandon the animal-derived material.
According to the Center, several athletic brands, including Japan’s Mizuno, are still using kangaroo leather. Men’s luxury dress shoe brands in Europe also sell k-leather products. Diadora pledged to abandon k-leather back in 2019, according to the organization.
“New Balance deserves our praise for pledging to disassociate itself from the wildlife-skin trade,” Wayne Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action, said. “The two biggest athletic shoe sellers based in the United States have announced in 2023 that they will rapidly phase out sourcing kangaroo skins for soccer shoes, and there’s no question that the decisions will diminish the financing for the largest commercial massacres of kangaroos in their native habitats in Australia.” The “harvesting” of kangaroos is, in reality, a brutal slaughter. And it happens in remote locations, far from the public eye, meaning there is no effective monitoring of animal welfare.
Kangaroos form strong and complex family bonds, and these gentle families are ripped apart after the sun goes down across their homeland. Close-knit mobs of kangaroos are chased down by commercial shooters with bright lights and guns. Those unable to flee have their bodies strung up in the back of trucks. Their joeys, considered ‘useless’, are decapitated or bludgeoned to death. Some joeys who are grown-up enough to hop away, escape only to starve or be killed by predators without the protection of their mum. Of the millions of native kangaroos who are shot and killed every year, it’s unknown how many more escape wounded, only to endure a long and painful death.
