Dear John,

One more domino has fallen.

One more victory for a signature campaign to restrict the trade in wildlife parts.

New Balance, the Boston-based athletic shoe giant, told us this week it will stop using kangaroo skins in its soccer cleats.

This announcement, a direct derivative of our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign, follows similar announcements we secured just more than six months ago from Nike and Puma.

Can you make a donation of $10 to ban the use of kangaroo leather in ALL shoes?

Since we launched our campaign to stop commerce in kangaroo skins three years ago, four of the five biggest names in athletic footwear have gotten on board with our corporate reform efforts: Diadora (Italy), Puma (Germany), Nike (United States), and now New Balance (United States).

The biggest outlier is Adidas (Germany), which for years has fought efforts to halt the trade in kangaroo skins for soccer shoes and even went all the way to the California Supreme Court in its failed efforts to unwind California’s law banning the kangaroo-skin trade.

Again, this is one more enormously consequential moment in our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign, bringing us closer to our goal of halting the massacre of kangaroos in the Outback of Australia. When we succeed, this campaign will rival in impact our successes in passing the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 last year to eliminate an 80-year-old requirement for animal testing in drug development; enacting in 2018 a comprehensive national ban on dogfighting and cockfighting on every inch of U.S. soil, including the U.S. territories; and helping pass key ballot measures like Prop 12 (anti-farm-animal confinement) in California and Amendment 10 (a ban on greyhound racing) in Florida that triggered national reform efforts on those subjects.

Simply, there is no company that needs kangaroo skins for its athletic shoes. Innovation in the use of human fabrics has made kangaroo-based shoes obsolete. And moral awareness about the suffering of animals makes companies continuing with this practice complicit in cruelty to wildlife.

Our read-out on the shoe choices of elite soccer stars at the 2022 World Cup and the 2021 European Championships revealed that the best players in the world preferred shoes not made from the backs of kangaroos. If they recognize kangaroo shoes are not needed for peak performance, so can the rest of us.

Remember, commercial shooters massacre more than a million kangaroos a year in the wild in Australia. Add to that the more than 400,000 joeys orphaned after their mothers are shot in night-time slaughters of entire families.

Remember, if these global brands continue to buy skins, the commercial demand for kangaroo skins will continue, and that means the inhumane death of hundreds of thousands of adult kangaroos and joeys every year.

Since we started our campaign, it appears the commercial kill of kangaroos has been reduced by 700,000. And remember, Nike and Puma agreed to end any use of kangaroo skins by the end of 2023 and New Balance is ending their use next year. In short, our campaign has already caused these companies, including Adidas, to shrink the number of shoe models made from kangaroos. But our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign will only come into full force when the companies’ phase-outs of kangaroo sourcing and manufacturing are fully implemented in the coming months.

We are closer than ever to stopping the global trade in kangaroo parts for footwear for the world’s most popular sport.

I’ll have more to say soon about our campaign to halt Adidas’s use of kangaroo skins. But for now, it’s a moment to celebrate one more big gain, with special thanks to our partners at the Animal Justice Party in Australia, Their Turn in New York, and SPCA International in New York.

And I want to thank the leaders at New Balance for embracing change and understanding that animal cruelty should be a core corporate concern. We thank them for making this important humane declaration!

With you at our side, we can convince the biggest companies in the world and prevail and protect animals. I want to ask if you’ll double down to invest in this campaign so we can complete our work with the athletic shoe retail industry.

Kangaroos do not exist to be turned into shoes.

Thank you for your passion for all animals.

For Australia’s wildlife,

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy