͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌To prevent cruelty to animals, we promote enacting and enforcing good public policies. To enact good laws, we must elect good lawmakers, and that’s why we remind voters which candidates care about our issues and which ones don’t. If you’d like to unsubscribe, click here. [[link removed]]

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Adidas Persists in Sourcing Kangaroos for Shoes, Even as All Major Competitors Shed the Skins
Dear friend,
Let me tell you one thing about our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign.
It’s a matter of life and death for kangaroos.
If we don’t complete work on the campaign, commercial shooters will keep guns blazing and wipe out additional millions of kangaroos. If we win, by shutting down the foreign markets for their skins and meat, we shut off the spigot of kangaroo killing in Australia.
Today, I’m happy to announce that thanks to a generous supporter, we have a new $10,000 matching gift opportunity specifically to make progress in our fight for kangaroos. More on that below.
Entire Families Gunned Down
Every night for months of the year, with enough ammunition to do so many damage, commercial shooters fan out across the countryside of Australia and gun down entire families of kangaroos. They don’t spare the lactating females. And that means they orphan, when you add up the collective body count, hundreds of thousands of newly born kangaroos (the joeys).
We’ve been fighting this massacre—the biggest open-air slaughter of native wildlife in the world.
And we’ve been making progress.
This year, at our urging, Puma announced an end to the trade. Two weeks later, Nike made a similar announcement. And in September, New Balance followed. The Italy-based soccer giant, Diadora, made a pledge to get out of the kangaroo trade in 2021.
Among the big five brands in the soccer shoe space, that leaves just Adidas as the outlier.
Now it’s time for Adidas to stop the stonewalling, the excuse-making, and the disregard for the suffering of kangaroos, especially the joeys orphaned and then bludgeoned by the shooters. Here’s where you come in.
A very special supporter of ours—Gavin Polone, a Hollywood movie and TV director (“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Panic Room,” “Zombieland,” and so many other creative works)— made a short movie [[link removed]] for us, with Hollywood partner Derek Ambrosi, that reverses the process of turning kangaroos into shoes. Gavin and Derek start with a soccer player on the field, and end with a kangaroo in the gunsights of a commercial shooter. It connects the purchasing practice (buying the shoes) with the killing grounds thousands of miles away from the commercial transaction.
Gavin has done a lot to help us, but he’s says there’s more to do. He told me last week that he’ll provide a match of $10,000 to help us fund the next phase of our campaign to convince Adidas to give up its role in the kangaroo trade.
He cares so much because he hates cruelty. Just like you and me.
And there’s so much cruelty associated with this trade. More than a million dead kangaroos. On top of that, add at least 300,000 joeys—orphans unable to survive without their moms—as collateral damage.
Australia’s Government and Adidas Work to Preserve Kangaroo Killing
The Australian government’s baseless argument that kangaroos—uniquely adapted to Australia’s landscape after 15 million years of habitation—need to be killed to avoid starvation is as hollow as Canada’s efforts to say that seals destroyed the North Atlantic cod fishery. But now, with Adidas’s competitors making pledges to halt their role in the trade, the momentum is with us.
Our work is moving forward on a hundred fronts, and that includes federal legislation [[link removed]] and more than a half dozen legislative efforts to ban the trade in kangaroo parts. Our country’s biggest state, California, already has such a law—and Adidas has been regularly violating the law, based on our investigations.
Not Even Australia’s Forest Fires Stirred the Conscience of Adidas
The world watched with pity and shock as fires killed millions of kangaroos just three years ago. If it was a moral problem for the kangaroos to be burned in that conflagration, isn’t it also a problem for the kangaroos to go down in a torrent of gunfire? Perhaps the shooting, which runs day after day, is even worse, with its clockwork schedule and premeditation.
Adidas has posted high-minded rhetoric on its website about sustainability and even dabbled with animal welfare commitments. “Sport is about the constant pursuit of better,” reads a company mantra. “Material innovation is no different.”
But could anything ring more hollow when the company is tied to a trade that snuffs out 1.3 million animals a year when there are plenty of other materials for making shoes?
The center of gravity in the athletic-shoe industry has shifted, with the important announcements this year from Puma, Nike, and New Balance. The question is, when will Adidas finally divorce itself from the mass killings of animals who need their skins much more than the company ever has?
Will you please donate TODAY to our Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign and double your money by freeing Gavin Polone’s matching gift? [[link removed]]
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For the kangaroos,
Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Animal Wellness Action
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