Thanks to our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign — launched in 2020 — the world now knows the gory details of the largest slaughter of mammals in the world for commercial trade in their parts.
In Australia, nighttime shooters roll into the homes and habitats of kangaroos with their spotlights and rifles and take aim at entire families of kangaroos — shooting down as many as their aim and weapons allow, without distinguishing between males and females.
Many of the females have a joey in the pouch or at the foot. And without their “mums,” the newborns are doomed.
It’s estimated these commercial shooters slay more than one million adult kangaroos in their native habitats in Australia, killing about 300,000 lactating females and leaving about 300,000 joeys to face the world orphaned, afraid, and not equipped to survive.
That’s about the same number of harped and hooded seals clubbed and shot at the zenith some decades ago of the infamous springtime slaughter on the ice floes of Atlantic Canada.
Corporate Action Is Driving Political Awareness
Earlier this year, U.K.-based soccer shoe maker Sokito joined athletic shoe giants Nike, Puma, and New Balance in divorcing the company from this commercial slaughter of kangaroo families and clans. Diadora, an Italy-based athletic shoe giant, dropped kangaroo-based shoes in 2021.
These decisions came as a direct response to the awareness and campaign work built up by Animal Wellness Action and our sister organization, the Center for a Humane Economy, through its Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign.
Animal Wellness Action, The Center, and its allies across the globe have demanded that athletic shoe companies use alternative fabrics in footwear to halt the mass wounding and killing of kangaroos. Those alternative fabrics dominate their soccer shoe models already, so there’s no argument on the functional necessity of kangaroo skin.
This week, the Japan-based ASICS told us that the company is “actively testing and evaluating alternatives that meet our stringent quality and performance standards, with the goal to eliminate the use of kangaroo leather.” We are glad to hear that the company has a goal of exiting the kangaroo skin trade, but no more “testing and evaluating alternatives” is needed. Many of the biggest brands are already kangaroo-free, and our read-out on the shoes worn by the world’s top soccer players shows very few wear kangaroo-skin shoes any longer. Back in 2022, the Center for a Humane Economy determined that the vast majority — 94.6 percent — of all World Cup goals scored that year were from players wearing shoes made from human-made fabrics, and just 5.4 percent were scored with kangaroo-based shoes.
U.S. Senators Say They’ve Seen Enough
This week, we picked up two very prominent supporters — U.S. Sens. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and Cory Booker, D-N.J. For the first time, U.S. senators have introduced legislation to ban the trade in kangaroo parts in the United States — one of the world’s largest markets for Australian kangaroo skins and other kangaroo products.
The freshly minted Kangaroo Protection Act of 2024, S. 5118, aligns with a U.S. House bill, H.R. 4995, led by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., to achieve the same purpose. These lawmakers in both chambers of Congress are seeking to extend to the nation what a law in California does in our nation’s biggest state and largest soccer market.
“The mass killing of millions of kangaroos to make commercial products is needless and inhumane — and we must do better,” said Sen. Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient who has seen suffering and violence firsthand. “I’m proud to introduce this bill with Senator Booker that would help prevent the deadly exploitation of kangaroos and promote the use of more humane alternatives to k-leather.”
“We must take action to conserve the kangaroo species and end their inhumane exploitation,” said Sen. Booker. “This legislation will ensure that no one in the United States can distribute kangaroo products for commercial benefits.”
We hope to see the Senate take up this bill at the end of the year and pass it by unanimous consent. With the two major U.S. brands — Nike and New Balance — exiting the kangaroo trade, there’s just no reason for the U.S. not to build on California’s complete and non-controversial ban on selling kangaroo parts.
Adidas Remains the Outlier Among Top Five Athletic Shoe Brands
There’s no question that Adidas has been the worst athletic wear company on the planet when it comes to kangaroos. It worked for years, without success, to reverse California’s ban on selling kangaroo parts, not only asking legislators to repeal the law but also taking a case to the California Supreme Court to overturn it.
Adidas even reneged on a public pledge in 2012 to end its role in the kangaroo skin trade.
Adidas’s CEO is now sending signals that the company may finally do the right thing, but we’ve heard hollow promises from company leaders many times before. We need action, not doublespeak and more dithering.
In the past, Adidas told the public that it has confidence in Australia’s “management” of the commercial kill and that night-time massacres are humane. But the company knows the cruelty behind its corporate decisions because even the Australian government acknowledges that the joeys are collateral damage of the export trade in kangaroo skins.
Australia mandates that any orphaned joeys found must be killed by blunt force trauma, such as hitting them in the head with a rock or slamming their skulls against a truck fender. The mere acknowledgement of the need for these “humane killing” guidelines with rocks and fenders tells us that Australia knows about the mass orphaning problem in the field.
Kangaroos are native to Australia, uniquely adapted to the landscapes of Australia. They’ve survived for 15 million years, whereas humans have occupied the Australian continent for only about 50,000 years. In all that time, kangaroos in the wild never required the kind of population “management” meted out by government and industry today.
Can anyone at Adidas or within the Australian government logically suggest that the outcome could be worse for the animals if these shooting sprees, conducted to feed foreign markets, were halted?
From beginning to end, Australia’s assault on kangaroos is ghastly and cruel. And nobody who boosts the trade can say with a straight face that it is cruelty-free. It’s anything and everything but that. Australia shamelessly markets the fetching presence of the kangaroos in its marketing and promotions, but then in the dark of night, it gives the nod and turns men loose to slay the gentle animals and to bash the skulls of their offspring.