A New and Improved Moral Footprint for the Athletic Shoe Industry

During the last three weeks, we’ve seen a rush of announcements from leaders of three big brands in the athletic shoe industry — Adidas first and then ASICS and Mizuno. The companies pledged to cease sourcing kangaroos for the uppers in soccer cleats.

With their rapid-fire public commitments in May, the Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign has now run the table on this issue with all seven of the world’s leading soccer shoe manufacturers.

It’s a head-snapping turnaround for the corporate leaders in this sector of the economy. At last count, Mizuno alone had upwards of 25 shoe models made from kangaroos. Adidas has been for decades the most politically active company protecting the industry’s freedom to participate in the skin trade.

Dumping kangaroo skins from the supply chains of companies that sell shoes to hundreds of millions of consumers on six continents may very well result in the collapse of the foreign market for kangaroo leather. That’s a good thing, given that the skins are the most valued part of the marsupials. It’s exciting there may soon be a cratering in the scale of what was the largest commercial slaughter of terrestrial wildlife anywhere on Earth.

Killing Wild Kangaroos At Odds with Wildlife Protection Values

Before we launched the Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign in 2020, we issued a research report and paper entitled “The Moral Footprint of the Athletic Shoe Industry.” We documented an industry striving for sustainability but still relying on commercial shooters to procure skins for soccer cleats. That sourcing practice struck me as vulnerable and ripe for reform.

Selling these shoes in the United States felt like a misfit, akin to a soccer player trying to fit his left foot into a shoe made for a right foot. We don’t shoot black bears in America and turn their coats into fur hats. We stopped killing bison for their hides and tongues for domestic or foreign markets in the 19^th century. We as a nation ended, more than a century ago, the practice of killing birds for their feathers and bundling them together to make ladies’ hats for the millinery trade. Why would we participate in this reckless, needless market killing of Australia’s native wildlife?

It was a false note, too, for Australia to put kangaroos at the center of the country’s marketing and tourism promotions while also quietly enabling and encouraging their mass killing. Heck, the kangaroo is featured on the Australian coat of arms. The logo of Qantas Airlines features the distinctive marsupial, too.

And the buying public had virtually no knowledge that when they laced up soccer shoes, they were wrapping kangaroo skin around their feet. When alerted to the gory details, most people didn’t like that idea one bit. 

Other Major U.S. and German Brands Abandoned Kangaroo Sourcing in 2023

Responding to the facts of our campaign and the swelling public disapproval that came with awareness, Puma announced a no-kangaroo-sourcing policy in March 2023. Nike followed within two weeks, and New Balance complied a few months later. Diadora, a major Italian brand, had preceded them in disassociating the company from this form of wildlife killing.

But, to my surprise, Adidas did not follow their lead. It would take two more years, and specifically, my speaking directly to Adidas’s board members, executive team, and shareholders at the company’s Annual General Meeting in Fürth, Germany, for reform to arrive. After my detailed discourse, before a crowd of 250, on the cruelty of the commercial slaughter and the company’s own innovations that made animal skins unnecessary and obsolete, the CEO declared right then and there that the company would exit the kangaroo skin trade for good.

We had already turned our attention to the other holdouts — two Japanese companies well known to American consumers, ASICS and Mizuno. Within days of Adidas’s announcement, ASICS corresponded with the Center for a Humane Economy, stating it would close out its use of kangaroos by year’s end. And a week after that, Mizuno told the Center’s Jennifer Skiff that it too was going to phase out the use of kangaroo parts — quite a statement for a company with more than two dozen kangaroo-skin models in the marketplace.

Diadora, Puma, Nike, New Balance, Adidas, ASICS, and Mizuno — along with the U.K.-based Sokito, which stopped kangaroo use in 2024 — collectively sold soccer shoes to hundreds of millions of athletes in 200 nations. Their work for years annually put millions of kangaroos in the gunsights.

The shift toward a more humane economic order will go a long way to shrinking foreign markets that commercial shooters have long depended upon. Up until just a few years ago, it was two million animals annually shot in the neck or head for shoes. But I knew, and the companies knew, that they’d been using more humane and sustainable fabrics for their shoe offerings for running, golf, tennis, and other sports. No reason for a moral exemption for soccer shoes. 

Mass Orphaning of Joeys

During the dark of night, commercial shooters in Australia head into the outback, armed with rifles and bright lights, and they aim to kill. If they come across a mob of kangaroos, they attempt to wipe out entire families if they have enough ammo and opportunity. The mothers are shot, too. That means their dependent joeys are doomed, left without essential maternal care, left to starve, or perhaps to be finished off by having their heads slammed against a truck fender or bashed in with a rock. The grim fate of hundreds of thousands of joeys is the backstory behind every new kangaroo-based pair of soccer cleats.

Australia’s government and its industry backers assert that kangaroo populations must be “culled” for management reasons. But these animals have roamed Australia’s ancient landscapes for 15 million years — long before the first humans arrived on the continent 50,000 years ago, and certainly before anyone built a soccer stadium. Evolution enables them to live in habitats across Australia, and decision-making under the guise of wildlife management is a poor substitute for the careful clockwork and precision of nature.

Australia’s states and territories have set kill quotas for six million kangaroos, but there’s not enough money in the kangaroo parts trade to employ nearly enough shooters to conduct killing on that scale. Last year, the shooters killed 1.3 million kangaroos — about 18% of the state quotas.

To be clear, the notion that shooting is done in some precise way to manage wildlife is a charade. If the nation cannot meet a fifth of the annual quota, and be so wildly at odds with its supposed management goal, what’s the point of any of the night-time killing sprees?

Companies Turn from Persecutors to Protectors

 For years, Adidas defended its use of kangaroo skins, even suing the state of California to overturn its ban on kangaroo products. California’s courts weren’t buying it. Nor were California lawmakers who turned back Adidas’s lobbying campaign to unwind the only state law forbidding trade in kangaroo skins.

Even as wildfires decimated kangaroo populations in 2020 — and the world sent money for wildlife rescue and long-term care of traumatized animals — Adidas wouldn’t budge. All the while, the company posted glossy statements about its commitment to “sustainability” and “innovation.”

But Adidas had become an outlier after the actions from Puma, Nike, and New Balance. Our campaign, aided by the protests by Donny Moss and Their Turn, Australia’s Animal Justice Party, and so many others, was creating discomfort for Adidas management across the world.

Hollywood producer and director Gavin Polone produced a gripping short film that rewinds the transformation of kangaroo to cleat, from pitch to crosshairs. And U.S. lawmakers, including Sens. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., introduced the bipartisan Kangaroo Protection Act to end any U.S. imports of kangaroo products.

In the end, the commotion and the contradictions were too much. And when some of the big names got on board, it made the holdouts look heartless and obdurate. The rush of announcements was, in its own way, inevitable.

 Kangaroos Are Not Shoes

Our campaign has been a case study in strategic and effective corporate reform. In just four years, our Center for a Humane Economy, alongside our sister group Animal Wellness Action, took on a global industry and won. We reframed the lives of kangaroos not as a resource, but as ancient beings — icons of Australia, deserving of care and protection, not commodification. We called on the companies to use their creativity and ingenuity to find a better way.

There’s still work to do. Mizuno must formalize its timeline. Adidas and other companies must honor their pledges. And Congress must pass the Kangaroo Protection Act to ensure our giant market no longer welcomes the sanitized skins sent our way by the collaboration of clothing companies and commercial shooters.

When we say, “Kangaroos Are Not Shoes,” we are iterating more than a campaign slogan. We are asserting the end of the era of treating wild animals as shoes, trinkets, and other goods sold opportunistically in the global marketplace. We are saying that the world’s most popular sport — soccer, a game enjoyed by billions — need not come at the expense of animals whose lives matter as much to them as our lives to us.

The sweep of the big brands on this issue is a big moment in the steady ascent of animal protection values. It’s a big moment for the Center for a Humane Economy/Animal Wellness Action. And it all bodes well for the symbol of a nation whose original and marvelous design through evolution or the hand of the Creator is so hard to improve upon.