Russell: UGG lines provides consumers style, warmth at expense of immoral, inhumane manufacturing process

“The typical UGG boot wearer is normally a thin white female with long blond hair and, in most cases, a fake tan,” so says Urban Dictionary. According to a survey taken on Pitt’s campus last month, she is also completely unaware of the materials from which her shoes are made.

Just 15 of the 50 female Pitt students surveyed correctly guessed the primary material that makes up this ubiquitous footwear: sheepskin. When questioned, Deckers Outdoor Corporation, parent company of UGG Australia, insisted that the sheepskin is derived “humanely” as “a byproduct of the meat industry.” The company’s website published a list of their contract factories in December 2013. Six out of the seven suppliers for Stella International Holdings Ltd. (provider of UGG products) were based in China. The seventh was based in Ghana.

But here’s where it gets interesting: under the “Supplier Code of Conduct” header, Deckers Outdoor Corporation writes, “The materials used in our products comply with [the] laws of the country, or countries, in which our products are made.” China, a country where cats and dogs are frequently slaughtered for food, has virtually no legal establishment of animal welfare. In Ghana, the laws are questionable, though admittedly not quite as monstrous.

Another defense that Deckers continually pushed was the strictness of the Supplier Code of Conduct document. Though the document goes to great lengths to ensure workers rights, there is absolutely no mention of animal welfare. In other words, Chinese manufacturers can starve and abuse sheep without violating any government-instituted laws, thus not overstepping Deckers’ ethical boundaries. 3 from undercover reporters working with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offers even more support for the treatment of sheep used in the meat industry.

The video shows sheep experiencing cruel treatment on Australian farms (where many sheep are bred before skinning) and even worse at the slaughterhouse: having their limbs cut off while still conscious and their throats slit for a long, agonizing death.

Before slaughter, sheep are castrated and have their tails removed. Many even undergo a process called mulesing, which involves cutting off the flesh from the backside of a sheep to prevent flystrike — a condition where flies lay their eggs and hatch flesh-eating maggots on parts of the animal with high concentrations of blood, urine and feces. Although Deckers Outdoor Corporation claims it doesn’t trade with suppliers who practice mulesing, many of the sheep farmers that supply the wool come from Australia, where it is completely legal and commonly practiced.

Australia is home to some of the biggest suppliers of wool, much of which comes from Merino sheep, who are not native to the region’s climate. Sheep are bred into genetic mutants to produce as much wool as possible. This overgrowth leaves sheep vulnerable to infections and diseases, which is why mulesing is necessary and practiced in the first place.

To be fair, this unethical treatment is common in the meat industry, so Deckers might be telling customers all they need to know when they call the manufacturing of UGG boots “a byproduct of the meat industry.” This phrase (parroted by every Deckers representative I spoke with) was apparently concocted by public relations experts as the best psychological formula for drawing out the collective sigh of uneasy customers.

Rather than calling into question the cruelty of the meat industry, this phrase is largely considered to be unproblematic. It’s why the PR pros came up with it in the first place. In the average American moral code, sheep slaughtered primarily for their skin is wrong, but if they’re being used for food, too, well I guess that’s OK.

Eating meat is such an ingrained, socially-accepted part of American culture that it’s easy to adopt the flimsy arguments for it as a means of maintaining the status quo. And it’s made even easier by corporations who don’t want you to know what went into the final, polished product. Just take a look at the frozen McRib photo that went viral last month.

Worse than public concession of the meat industry is the defeatist attitude — the one that says, “Well, my iPhone and clothing came at the expense of suffering, too, so why bother?” It’s true that ethical decisions in most cases (especially with buying electronics) are difficult to make without simply going off the grid, but a meat-free diet isn’t one of them. Moreover, this reasoning begs the question of why anyone would bother alleviating any suffering at all if they can’t alleviate all suffering?

Overall, the comfort of your UGG boots is indivisible from the suffering of non-human animals.

Write Natalie at natalie.russell8@gmail.com.