I also want to be as far from the meat industry as I can, and I'm not at all promoting use of leather. I'm against it. But I live in a town (country?) where vegan shoes are impossible to find, and I still haven't tried to order shoes by mail order... Veggie4Life, I don't think an animal had to die for my shoes, and frankly, I don't think using by-products makes such a big difference - for the animals. To me, it's a bit like wearing old leather shoes. The animals wouldn't have been reborn if I dropped using them, and an animal that is killed for food won't become alive if their skin isn't used.
I'm still avoiding animal products almost always. Some vegans seem to spend hours every month on figuring out how to avoid 0,0001% traces of animal products in their life, personally I think this time would be better spent writing an article in the local newspaper about whatever your reasons for being a vegan are.
But it really doesn't make sense to be against killing animals, and at the same time wear the skin from their dead bodies.
By the way, the reason I call myself 99% vegan isn't that I'm not supporting the vegan ways of looking at life. It's just a personal thing, I have tried to become 100% vegan, and have figured out that it's better for me to accept that I'm not a perfect vegan than pushing myself towards to become 100%. I guess I could be a 100% vegan for some months, but I have seen people forcing themselves into being something they're not ready for, and then - after a while, they dropped the whole thing. I would never start eating meat or dairy again, I just feels better to claim that I'm 99% (and maybe be 99.5%) than claiming that I'm 100% vegan if it isn't really true.
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