A group of animal rights advocates (Animal rights group) filed a lawsuit in the San Francisco Superior Court against well-known sporting goods manufacturer Adidas-Salomon AG. The animal advocates accused Adidas of selling shoes made of kangaroo leather in California, which is prohibited under local law. The plaintiffs demand that the shoes be immediately removed from sale. To this end, they provided the court with information about exactly which stores are selling the "illegal" shoes.
At Adidas' headquarters in Germany, the intention of the greens to sue the company is considered unlawful. As Adidas corporate PR manager Anne Putz told Gazeta.Ru, "what is happening now in California is illegal. That is all we can say." However, Putz refused to explain why the company considers the lawsuit to contradict the law.
German experts say the problem has been created from nothing. According to Gavin Finlayson, an analyst at Frankfurt's Commerzbank (incidentally, a native of Australia), "concern for our smaller brothers deserves respect, but it is still not worth blowing this up into a scandal." Nevertheless, news of the lawsuit against Adidas has already had an extremely negative effect on the German company's share prices. Their value on the German stock exchange DAX fell by as much as 102 points (3.40%) in two hours.
Dmitri Vinevsky, manager of Adidas' Moscow office, told about what kind of shoes Adidas makes from kangaroo leather. Kangaroo leather is used as a material for making football boots. These boots, produced under the Predator brand (from English "predator"), were developed specifically for the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and Korea, and the face of the advertising campaign promoting them is the famous footballer David Beckham. "These boots are much more comfortable and durable than shoes made from ordinary material," Vinevsky says with pride. "Apart from purely aesthetic merits, kangaroo shoes are distinguished by remarkable practicality and adaptability specifically to our conditions: you will not need external moisture protection because kangaroo leather has natural water resistance."
"A kangaroo in Australia is the same as a cow in Russia or America. Yet for some reason American animal activists do not protest against the use of cowhide as a material for making shoes," the Adidas manager wonders.
Australia's kangaroo meat and leather industry has recently been gaining momentum, bringing the state a profit of $128 million a year. Despite numerous protests from animal defenders, quotas for culling animals are increasing year by year (this year, the culling of 6.9 million kangaroos has been permitted). Over the past ten years, Australians have begun to consume marsupial meat after the Australian states, one by one, lifted the corresponding ban in the early 1990s. However, there is still no mass sale of kangaroo meat in supermarkets.
Despite the fact that the kangaroo is considered a symbol of Australia, farmers do not like them, considering them pests, and complain that the marsupials eat the sheep's pasture and damage crops. And drivers in rural areas are forced to stop on the roadsides from sunset until dawn to avoid colliding with kangaroos.
Meanwhile, the first European settlers perceived kangaroos primarily as game, as the main source of meat. The authorities of the settlements hired hunters and obliged convicts exiled to Australia to shoot kangaroos in order to provide the population with food. Farmers shot them as competitors to their sheep. Even sport hunting of kangaroos, like the British fox hunt, flourished.
When Europeans first saw these amazing animals, they asked the Aborigines what they were. One of them replied: "Kangaroo," which in the language of the local tribe meant "I don't understand." The members of Captain Cook's expedition, in turn, did not know the native language and decided that this was the name of the jumping creature.
_