Oregon legislator introduces bill to ban sale of kangaroo parts

PORTLAND, Oregon. A bill has been introduced in the Oregon Legislature to ban the sale of kangaroo parts against sportswear manufacturers that use animal skin to make their products.

Football boots are one of the few kangaroo leather items commonly sold in Oregon, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting. The move will affect Nike, which is based in Oregon and is the state’s largest employer.

“It is shameless that millions of native wildlife in Australia have been killed for the sake of elite football boots worn by elite footballers,” Oregon Democratic Senator Floyd Prozansky, who introduced the bill, said in a press release. published on Monday by animal rights groups. “I understand that this law may have financial implications for some Oregon shoe manufacturers, but ultimately, Oregon must be on the human side of this issue. There are other materials that can be used to make these high quality boots.”

In a press release, the Center for the Humane Economy, Animal Wellness Action and Animal Wellness Foundation applauded the move.

“The time has come for these shoe manufacturers to change their business model to eliminate extreme animal cruelty in their products,” said René Tatro, board member of the Center for Humane Economics.

Nike did not respond to an OPB request for comment, but the company told ESPN last month that it uses kangaroo leather in a “small portion” of its football boots and that it “works with leather suppliers who source animal skins from processors that use sound.” animal husbandry and humane treatment of farmed, domestic or wild animals.

The Oregon bill would make it an offense to purchase, receive, sell, or commercially exchange “any product containing the part of a dead kangaroo.”

Connecticut lawmakers introduced a similar bill in this session. A federal ban on kangaroo products was proposed in the US House of Representatives in 2021 but was not approved.

The “k-leather” ban had a precedent: California banned kangaroo leather products in the 1970s.

Commercial trapping of kangaroos in Australia is legal. More than 1.3 million kangaroos were killed commercially in the country in 2021, OPB reports, citing the Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water. The agency said the number represented less than one-third of the “sustainable quota” that it believes could be killed without putting any of the four main kangaroo species at risk.

In the US from the mid-70s to the mid-90s, several species of kangaroo were considered “endangered”, but the animal is believed to have “recovered”.

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