#obviously what's actually going on is that leather is meaningfully bad but nowhere near the worst bad thing normal people do

[comparativelysuperlative]

Saw some of the Interminable Leather Discourse on my dash. Has anyone ever done an authoritative estimate of how bad it is or isn't?

They don't raise and kill animals specifically for leather. The hide is 4-10% of the monetary value of animals raised and killed for meat.

(10% according a rando on the leatherworking Reddit; 4% according to The Leather Lobby Incorporated's page on We Swear We're Not Evil, You Guys, citing a source that does not seem to say that. I'm just going to call it 5% for the round number.)

Approximately 55 square feet of leather per cow.

The lobbyists up there said it was 69% cows; the rest is sheep+goats+pigs, with pigs being the next biggest. Make it ~42.6 square feet per dead animal; the true number will be a bit smaller because they're not all pigs.

(Apparently if you buy Chinese leather and aren't careful about your sources they sometimes sell leather made from cat or dog skin and lie about it. I assume leather-wearers are not okay with this, but would be interested to find out why. Like, I know my reason, but it's probably not the same one.)

40 square feet for a small men's jacket. More for large, less for women.

A typical leather jacket kills about 1/20th of an animal, in the same ballpark as eating 100 (beef) burgers, or about half of a (chicken) burger.

Animals killed by faux leather:

Literally none?

If every plastic jacket you ever buy ends up in a landfill, that's like...one really big trash bag? A few square feet of area that didn't have much of anything living on it anyway?

Not trying to be sarcastic here; I just genuinely don't see how this hurts or kills much of anything.

Making plastic can't possibly be good for the environment, but it's definitely less bad than growing a one-twentieth-ass cow.

Final opinion on the Discourse:

Depending on how much meat you eat and how long you wear your clothes for, wearing leather is probably less bad than eating beef but around that ballpark.

It is way less bad than eating chicken.

As always, someone who eats as many cows as they want and no other animals has accomplished most of the good things about being vegan with barely any effort. This stays true if they also wear leather.

Arguing about leather is like arguing about the difference between mostly-vegetarian and actually-vegetarian.

I was hoping it'd be a small enough difference that I could say whatever, it's a rounding error, I'm gonna go buy leather now. It wasn't; this is a real difference.

But it is small enough that if you want to wear a leather without people yelling at you, you can skip buying chicken for three weeks and link the activists here so they get mad at me instead of you.

You know, if Internet arguments sound like a fun use of your time.