Do Life Right

A recent question I received: “I’ve recently become vegan, but I can’t replace all of my leather items right now. What should I do? Some things just aren’t made of anything else except leather, are they? It feels wrong to wear or own these items, but I don’t know what to do.”

I’ve also heard the myth that leather is a superior quality material than the many numerous vegan alternatives available today. The sad thing is that animal products show up in unexpected locations (like the back tag of jeans, necklaces, art supplies, picture frames, etc.). We’ve been shocked at the places we’ve found animal products (even our old shampoo!).

When my family and I fully embraced the vegan lifestyle, we realized that the ethical nature of this decision went far beyond what foods we put into our bodies. It also needed to emcompass what we wore, what we cleaned with, and what we had around our house. This ultimately made us decide to not purchase, wear, or use animal products ever again (as much as possible).

What’s so wrong with using leather, wool, silk, and other animal by-products? A lot! Check out these sites for more information:

• Cows Are Cool
• PETA’s Introduction on the topic

How we phased out animal products:

We started by going around our entire house and noticing all the animal products that we had (and making a mental list). We were shocked! Then, we systematically replaced (or just got rid of) non-vegan items. Even after we thought we had located everything, we kept accidentally coming across non-vegan items around our house: the leather tags on the back of jeans, an old leather wallet, a shirt with raw silk, picture frames, even mobiles with silk and leather. For a while there it felt like it was everywhere and it was overwhelming to us. We also weren’t sure at first what to do with our non-vegan items. We decided to honor the animals they were made out of and give the items to charity rather than throw them in the garbage (this is what we still do with non-vegan gifts that we receive).

The only items that gave us a dilemma were seldom worn dress shoes made of leather and work gloves. We talked and thought about what to do for a long time. We considered: (1) throwing them away, (2) giving them to charity, (3) wearing them and not caring, and (4) wearing them and being thankful for the animals that they were made of (knowing that they couldn’t get their lives back now). We decided to go with choice (4) temporarily, even though it made us very uncomfortable, while we researched finding alternatives that were better (we’ve been SO happy with our vegan “pleather” items — they hold up so well and last so long!). For my husband’s dress shoes (that had only been worn once every 3 years or so), we kept the leather ones as an emergency back up until the next time we knew he was going to need dress shoes — then we found nice non-leather ones and bought those. We then gave the leather ones to charity so that the sacrifice of the animal(s) they were made of wasn’t a complete waste. Our regular leather tennis shoes wore out quickly (as they always do) and needed to be tossed and replaced in a reasonable timeframe, so these weren’t an issue at all. We’ve discovered that with vegan shoes, we now wear our soles down first before the rest of the shoe.

Our biggest dilemma was leather work gloves. We needed to wear gloves whilst erecting a fence and doing hard manual yard labor. Seeing the results of not wearing gloves during hard labor (my husband forgot to take his gloves one day when he was doing hard manual labor and came back covered in blisters — I don’t recommend this) made us realize that some sort of hand covering was definitely necessary. It took us months of research to find vegan alternatives, but now that we have we’ll never go back. In the mean time, he desperately needed something on his hands to protect them and we were thankful to the cow whose skin he was using (although we later found out that it actually might have been a dog since the gloves were made in China).As a family (with our oldest daughter being the instigator of our vegan lifestyle), the big thing for us was LOTS of talk about the situation. Our daughters understood the financial and ethical reasons for our eclectic decisions that took a long time to implement since we came to the final decisions together — collectively, taking all of our feelings and needs into account (we all felt the same way, we just couldn’t find alternatives for a while). Then, we followed through. The big shock to us was realizing just how many animal products exist in most households and how big of a decision it was to replace all of those items. It isn’t easy or financially realistic for most people to make this drastic of a change overnight. Our household is 100% vegan now, but it took a couple of years — way longer than one month like we originally thought it would. Thankfully, leather wears out a lot quicker than the high quality vegan counterparts, so we needed to replace items after a while.

Be sensitive to your vegetarian and vegan friends. At this point in our Unschooling Vegan journey, my daughter’s feelings get hurt whenever she receives a gift that contains animal products. She feels that if a person doesn’t know her well enough to know to not buy her leather/silk/etc. then they shouldn’t be buying her gifts. Most vegans feel similarly. If you don’t know what a product is made out of, don’t buy it.

Not sure where to find leather alternatives? Check out these resources for a start:

• VRG.org’s Guide to Leather Alternatives
• PETA’s Shopping Guide to Compassionate Clothing
• Do Life Right’s Vegan Leather Alternatives Blog Postings
• Vegan Essentials
• Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe