Animal co-products

366:
“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity ( …that’s any fun at all for humanity)”. Ogden Nash.
We live for pleasure and acceptance, young and old. Appearance is important, for young people especially. Fashion is important and particularly for young women their shoes have to look right ... but for vegan women there’s often not much to choose from. It puts them in a very difficult position, as regards fashionable footwear. And so to the general matter of shoes. When I look around, downwards, I don’t see much on people’s feet other than leather, whether it’s hardy walking boots or part of formal footwear. It doesn’t cross people’s minds to think about this co-product of the abattoir. Animals’ hides are often more valuable to the shoe industry than the carcass is to the meat industry.
So it comes to this - we’re more likely to go for attractive or hard-wearing shoes than consider the ethics of leather. We’ll maybe eat non-animal foods for health reasons but not rule out wearing the skins of animals, because a shoe will not adversely affect our health.
Even with health itself we may consider that the eating of junk food is okay because, especially when we’re young, health isn’t an issue … that is until we put on body weight … and even then we only tinker with foods that fatten us, which is close to vanity and far from good health practice.
Whatever commodity we consider essential to our lifestyle, whether we are young or old, we try to squeeze what we can from what’s available. We spend big, risk debt, ignore warnings and mainly consider our own interests. We want to live for the moment. Above all we try NOT to become like those sad people (usually older people) who don’t live life or seem to have any real fun at all.
A young person’s instinct will be to paint their life with brush strokes from a brightly coloured palette. And to make it all look more exciting than it is, it’s best not to think about things too deeply, so as not to undermine self confidence. At a certain age young people, who’ve been controlled throughout their childhoods, are suddenly free to experience every possible stimulating experience. And why not? “We only live once, so live life while you can” …that is until the shutters come down and we are forced to change (usually in later years) ... by which time we’ve lost all the fun of life and become the victims of our own vanity. And in all that time we’ve maybe never considered the animals whose lives have been sacrificed to make our own colourful life possible.