Why These Kangaroo Leather Boots Are So Underrated

Kangaroos are famous and exotic and weird. And it’s true that almost every time an animal is famous and exotic and weird, it’s also endangered. But this is absolutely not the case with the kangaroo.

There are more kangaroos than people in Australia, they have no natural predators, and they’re prone to overpopulation and mass die-offs during summer droughts and fires. In fact, they’re often culled because they can get so numerous that they’re considered pests. In other words: kangaroo are basically deer.

Kangaroos are the deer of Australia. Very beautiful, very cool, they make very delicious if unreasonably low fat meat, they’re regularly hunted to control their population, and it would be a waste to not use their hides for leather. They’re deer! You should not feel weird about wearing kangaroo leather.

Especially because, as it happens, kangaroo leather is the best boot leather. Read on for the reasons why and a list of the best kangaroo leather boots.

Top Picks for Kangaroo Leather Boots

• Briselblack Bootmaker: This high end Indonesian workshop uses old fashioned hand lasting and hand welting techniques to make boots that fit better and last longer than any you’ll find from a modern brand. Expect a 4-month wait, though.
• Grant Stone: Great value, great customer service, and speedy deliveries, Grant Stone focus on smart casual footwear and always have one or two kangaroo leather models — most often in green!
• LL Bean: Waterproof, shock absorbent, and available in insulated and uninsulated versions, these are the most functional, outdoorsy kangaroo boots on our list.

5 Reasons Why Kangaroo Leather Makes the Best Boots

I’m going to tell you five reasons why this leather is so underrated and why “K-Leather” boots should be your next purchase. (Unless you’re in California, where it’s banned. Sorry!)

1. Kangaroo Leather Ages Really Nicely

• Enthusiasts love undyed (“natural”) vegetable tanned kangaroo leather from Italy’s Maryam Tannery, who specialize in it

I know, I should have mentioned how goddamn strong this leather is first, but I wanted to explain the photos I’m using in this article.

Remember: there are plenty of brown and black kangaroo leather boots out there.

But I’m what they call “an obsessive boot nerd,” and guys in this community really, really like the look of well-aged leather. To that end, high-end boot nerds tend to love undyed leather. The kangaroo leather you’re seeing on two of my own boots in this article, Briselblack’s Chelsea and a discontinued Grant Stone boot, are made with leather that hasn’t been dyed.

Sure, it looks a little more like skin (it’s even a little pink when it’s brand new) but undyed leather (a.k.a. “natural leather”) darkens beautifully as it ages, acquiring a rich golden hue that darkens and lightens in different areas.

Boot nerds prefer natural leather, especially when it’s vegetable tanned in Italy, and especially when it’s kangaroo.

But you don’t have to get kangaroo boots that look like these! Below is a brown kangaroo leather boot that Grant Stone are selling at the time of writing. They’ve pretty consistently sold boots in some kind of kangaroo leather for years — surprisingly, they sell green kangaroo leather boots more than any other color!

2. Kangaroo Leather vs Cowhide: Kangaroo is Both Stronger and Stretchier!

• Kangaroo leather is twice as resistant to tears and punctures than cowhide

K-leather is totally different to cowhide. It has:

• a very low fat content
• a thin grain layer
• no sweat glands
• more uniform and tightly packed fibers
• no erector pili muscles (which make hair “stand on end”)
• more elastin that’s more evenly distributed (so it’s more stretchy)

My leatherworker pal Weston Kay at Rose Anvil ran some tests and found that when compared to cowhide leathers of similar thickness (boot leather tends to measure around 2 millimeters), K-leather is twice as strong. More specifically, it could hold twice as much weight before tearing and it required twice as much force to puncture.

This is why it’s also pretty common on protective motorcycle gear and also on whips: it’s both supple and strong enough to hit whip-cracking speeds at whip-level thinness.

Why Kangaroo Leather Soccer Cleats Are So Popular

While you may have never worn kangaroo leather, it’s incredibly popular in soccer. Read this sentence closely: kangaroo leather is the most common shoe in the most popular sport on Earth. Here’s why:

• Durability: Due to its uniform fibers, footwear crafted out of kangaroo leather distributes energy evenly around the area of impact. This avoids microfractures in the leather that would eventually lead to it cracking. 
• Strength-To-Weight Ratio: Kangaroo leather is naturally lighter in weight per meter, reducing the need to skive it down to appropriate thickness during manufacturing and making it more desirable for lightweight athletic footwear.
• Inexpensive: I’ll discuss this more in a later section, but despite being an exotic leather, it typically runs about the same price as cowhide that’s produced to the same specifications.

3. Kangaroo Leather Retains More Strength When Split

Tanneries often reduce the thickness of leather to make it more comfortable and easier to work with.

Let’s say you’ve got two pieces of leather, one from kangaroo and one from cowhide. One source found that when you split cowhide so that it loses 20 percent of its thickness, it loses some 95 percent of its strength. When the same thing happened to K-leather, it only lost 50 percent of its strength.

Comfort is subjective, but since a lot of people find thinner leather more comfortable, this means you can make a boot that’s both more comfortable and more durable than cowhide.

4. Kangaroo Leather Is Surprisingly Affordable

For all those advantages over cowhide, and even though it’s not a farmed animal, kangaroo leather really isn’t that expensive. There are a million factors that go into a boot’s price, but if the same brand is making the same boot in both K-leather and cowhide, they’ll typically be the same price.

After all, nobody is paying to raise the animals and it’s not expensive or difficult to hunt them. A lot of kangaroos are culled like pests rather than hunted like game.

5. Kangaroo Leather Is a Very Ethical Leather

If you believe there’s such a thing as ethical leather, there are a lot of arguments for preferring kangaroo leather over other animals.

• Cow hooves tend to wreck top soil but kangaroos don’t — they don’t have hooves and their environment is suited to handle their presence.
• Cows produce half the agricultural industry’s methane, which appears to be a significant contributor to the climate change. Per kilogram of meat, kangaroos produce twelve times less methane.
• Cows are farmed, kangaroos aren’t. No one is razing forests to raise kangaroos.
• Kangaroo leather comes from wild animals: even though you can argue cowhide can be a byproduct of factory farming rather than the purpose of factory farming, there’s no risk of supporting inhumane farming practices with K-leather.

Obviously, an animal has still died for you to have this leather — I’m not trying to convince anyone this stuff is vegan. But there’s a good argument that there’s far less suffering associated with its journey to your boots.

The Downsides of Kangaroo Leather

As I’ve been saying, kangaroo leather works pretty differently to cowhide, so it makes sense that the leather looks different too.

• Kangaroo leather is noticeably thinner than cowhide. It’s definitely not weaker, but it’ll probably wrinkle more when it flexes than your other boots.

• Kangaroo leather tends to have scars. This is pretty much unavoidable on leather made from wild animals; you usually have to give up any expectation of unblemished leather if your hide isn’t from a domestic animal. But the scarring is a lot less obvious than it is on, say, kudu, one of the more popular wild animal leathers.
  
• Kangaroo leather isn’t shiny. If you like to polish up your boots, this grainy, matte, usually vegetable tanned leather isn’t the right one for you.
  
• A lot of people feel really weird about buying kangaroo leather. California has even banned it, a move that baffled Australians on the ground. “You’d really prefer I let the hide go to waste?”

Why is Kangaroo Leather Banned In California?

California is notorious for quickly regulating goods and services that can potentially harm people or the environment. Lawmakers there instigated a ban on imported kangaroo leather and meat way back in 1971 when American conservationists saw a huge decline in Australia’s kangaroo population.

Following their expert assessment, kangaroos were put on the US endangered species list, and soon after, even Australia banned the exportation of kangaroo products. The bans were not heavily enforced on the Australian side.

For three decades, Australian politicians and ‘roo export giants lobbied American lawmakers to remove the animal from the American endangered species list. The American banned was lifted in 1995 but it still exists in California today.

In Australia, meanwhile, California’s ban has been met with confusion. The Washington Post has a great article on the divide between California’s capital and Australia’s outback, with one Aussie producer quoted as saying,

The animals are going to be culled; they might as well be culled humanely with a profit made by someone. To leave millions of kangaroos in the paddock to breed is a stupid way of going about it.

The Best Kangaroo Leather Boots

Due to a combination of the public’s general squeamishness about wearing leather from such a cute animal and the California ban removing the country’s most populous state from the market, not a lot of brands sell K-leather boots. Here are some that do!

1. Briselblack Bootmaker

This is the best of the best, but you might not want them. The reason they’re great is that this is a small Indonesian workshop that is considered by many to produce the world’s best Chelsea boots.

Their specialty is laceless footwear — a fiendishly difficult kind of boot to make, given you can’t adjust the fit — and they make them with extremely old fashioned techniques: hand lasted and hand welted, these boots take way more time and expertise to be made than modern brands, but it makes for a boot that fits better and lasts longer.

The downsides are that the boots cost $700, take about four months to arrive, and you’ll need to measure your feet to make sure they’ll fit. But that also means they can accommodate whatever’s unusual about your foot: I have a low instep and and my left foot is a quarter size larger than my right, and they made a boot that fit me better than any other.

They just have the undyed K-leather right now, but they’ll add an overdye in shades of brown or black if you like.

2. Grant Stone

Few brands manage to combine quality, customer service, and speed the way Grant Stone does. By using south Chinese shoemakers to build footwear with the best materials from all over the world, they’re able to offer a terrific range of smart casual boots, loafers, and shoes in an ever-changing variety of leathers.

The fact that their offerings are always changing means I can’t really direct you to one kangaroo leather boot — the undyed split toe boots of theirs that I’ve put all over this article are no longer being sold.

However, of all the brands I’ve ever looked at, Grant Stone is the most consistent at offering kangaroo leather boots. For whatever reason, their customers like their “Jungle” green kangaroo leather the most, and I’ve never seen it absent from their site. If you’re lucky, they might offer one of the brown or orange K-leather boots as well.

3. LL Bean

I don’t have a relationship with LL Bean so I don’t think I could get away with using one of their images in this article, but they might make the best outdoorsy kangaroo leather boot.

It’s not clear if it’s resoleable (so it probably isn’t) but their Upland Boots are waterproof, shock absorbent, and available in insulated and uninsulated versions for under $300.

Besides those three, the only other brand I’ve seen put out kangaroo leather boots with any consistency is Caswell Boot Company, a D.C.-based outfit that likes to mix rugged leathers with slightly dressy designs. There’s no kangaroo there right now, but it might be worth checking their site now and then if you’re keen for another option

The Verdict

Kangaroo is a strong, supple, durable, light, and long-wearing leather that makes boots that will last you for years. Whether you’re someone who loves a great leather patina or you just want uncommonly tough leather, then it’s definitely worth investing in a pair.

FAQs: Kangaroo Leather