Some argue that animals don't have the capacity to understand and feel pain, fear or distress, yet when a rat was given electric shocks its pulse rate and respiration quickened, it tensed up and looked “hyper-attentive”. When scared, this rat shared the same physical reactions as a person. It is completely unethical to force animals, creatures of instinct, to lead such an unnatural life and one of such misery, imprisonment and pain. Death, ironically, comes as a relief.
One may think “So what if we kill for fur? We kill for meat after all”, and leather in particular is seen as a by-product of the meat trade as the animal is already dead (although PETA does speculate that leather is actually a co-product of meat; the skin is worth about 10% of the animal’s total value). But even for leather this ethical question arises. Cows who are killed for leather endure extreme crowding, castration, branding (the burning of the animal’s skin with a red-hot iron which can last between 3-5 seconds), tail-docking (the removal of a part of their tails) and dehorning- all without an anaesthetic (the farmers see it as uneconomical to treat the animals they are about to kill). The animals always meet a violent and frightening death in the slaughterhouses, after a life imprisoned in ‘year round housing’: a life on concrete floors instead of grass. When a calf is born it has its horn buds burnt off and is fed drugs to gain weight quickly for meat. Cows who have been selectively bred for the meat industry live in agony, crippled by appalling health and insufferable diseases due to their forced weight gain; again a completely unnatural life. The softest and most luxurious Italian leather is often obtained from unborn calves whose mothers were slaughtered. The cow may be impregnated on purpose with the intention of killing her during the pregnancy to obtain this special kind of leather.
"the animals always meet a violent and frightening death"