Peccary gloves

[jcusey]

I'd say the leather is not quite what I have seen on $250 gloves--little things like scars--but the finish and workmanship are excellent and I will be buying more. I think the alpaca lining is great.

Mine do have a couple of very small scars. I agree with you, however: the craftsmanship is excellent, and it would be difficult to find better gloves at twice the price.

 

[eunice]

The peccary gloves are right now on sale in ebay again: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws....4430991 http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=4144426691

 

[kansen_leon]

yeah, i also bought a pair of peccary gloves with alpaca linning and it's great. The combination of a very soft leather, alpaca fiber and the characteristic that it's handsewn makes it invaluable.

About prices i have also found peccary gloves at roeckl.de and it's about 140Euros. $50 is 1/3 of it's regular price.

Thanks Kai & eunice.

 

[kansen_leon]

Quote:

I'd say the leather is not quite what I have seen on $250 gloves--little things like scars--but the finish and workmanship are excellent and I will be buying more. Â I think the alpaca lining is great.
Mine do have a couple of very small scars. I agree with you, however: the craftsmanship is excellent, and it would be difficult to find better gloves at twice the price.
remember that peccary is a amazonian wild pig, it lives in the jungle, so it's imposible to get a perfect skin of it.

 

[dah328]

I'm ordering a pair for next winter. Of the alpaca or merino linings, which is better suited to a winter glove? The description of alpaca sounds good (softer than cashmere, warmer than wool, etc.), but I'm not familiar with it and I don't know how warm it would be in comparison to merino.

dan

 

[The_Foxx]

I dunno.....they aren't as nice as these, in my opinion: http://www.bensilver.com/fs_stor....ay=2385 A little pricey, but the leather looks really great-- I have a similar pair I got on sale from Neiman Marcus a while back in Chicago.

 

[jcusey]

I dunno.....they aren't as nice as these, in my opinion: http://www.bensilver.com/fs_stor....ay=2385 A little pricey, but the leather looks really great-- I have a similar pair I got on sale from Neiman Marcus a while back in Chicago.

Well, I haven't seen the Ben Silver gloves in person, so I can't really say. I will say that the quality of photography for the eBay gloves isn't the best, while the quality of photography for Ben Silver is usually superlative; in other words, pictures could be deceiving. In any event, the gloves that I got were very nice, and they were at a very reasonable price. I'm not ordering $175 unlined gloves. $50 is more than reasonable.

 

[bengal-stripe]

The Peruvian gloves have a distinctive advantage over the Ben Silver ones: they are hand stitched. (In the Ben Silver's only the tree ribs are hand- but the rest is machine stitched.)

I'm fussy about hand-stitched gloves, but I was trained by a grand mother who was a glove fanatic. She had drawers full of the stuff: lacy one for the summer, fur lined for the winter, short gloves to just reach the wrist and long ones to go up to the elbow.

She has probably indoctrinated me, but I believe to this day that hand stitching is the quality mark of a good leather glove.

 

[mr. magoo]

I would not consider myself a rabblerousing activist, but I have to raise the spector on this thread. Is it possible that (i) the gloves are not actually peccary but domestic pig, or (ii) that this particular seller is breaking the law by failing to pay taxes for an endangered species?

A few months ago I contacted Alpaca 111, which is a large Peruvian retailer with direct ties to the largest Camelid (alpaca, vicuna, etc.) fiber producers and peccary producers about purchasing peccary gloves through them. This was the response:

"The cost per glove would be $77.00, plus $100 (CITEX), which are an exports permission for species in danger of extintion."

In other words, gloves from what I consider pretty close to the production source are $177 including taxes. Seriously, if you are buying vicuna from, say, Loro Piana, you are buying this company's vicuna, so it's not a fly by night operation but one that does legitimate good in Peru. Now perhaps these guys can get the gloves for $27 less than Alpaca 111. But what about the $100 tax? This suggests to me that either they aren't paying the tax, which goes to the propogation of the species and can be thanked for the survival of, among other things, the vicuna species, or else you're buying domestic pig.

Any thoughts of this conundrum, because I'd like to get a couple of pairs too, but don't really want to be taken to the cleaners and don't want to be breaking a rather beneficial law?

 

[jcusey]

I would not consider myself a rabblerousing activist, but I have to raise the spector on this thread. Is it possible that (i) the gloves are not actually peccary but domestic pig, or (ii) that this particular seller is breaking the law by failing to pay taxes for an endangered species?

I've seen leather that I know is domestic pigskin, and I've seen leather that I know is peccary. They look and feel different. I'm not an expert, but I think that the gloves are peccary.

I know that it's a real hassle to import peccary shoes, and I would imagine that the same hassle would apply to any peccary leather product. Since retail price for peccary shoes is about $125 more per pair than comparable calfskin shoes, since shoes take a lot more leather than gloves, and since part of the premium on shoes is undoubtedly due to the relative scarcity of peccary, I have a lot of trouble believing that the $100 duty figure that you were quoted is accurate.

Is this seller complying with Peruvian export law and American import law? I don't know. Were the skins used to make the crocodile belts that I own (and bought at retail) exported and imported legally? I have no idea. That's the responsibility of the importer, not me. It would be impossible to buy any imported product if the buyer had the responsibility to inquire into the circumstances under which the products were imported.

And we could have an extensive discussion about the benefits and efficacy of the Endangered Species Act, but that's not really the topic of this board.

 

[Kai]

I would not consider myself a rabblerousing activist, but I have to raise the spector on this thread.  Is it possible that (i) the gloves are not actually peccary but domestic pig, or (ii) that this particular seller is breaking the law by failing to pay taxes for an endangered species?  

I have several pairs of peccary gloves, including a pair from Paul Stuart and a pair from Pickett. I can definitely tell the difference between peccary and pigskin. Not only the grain, but the texture of the leather is quite a bit different between peccary and pigskin. The ebay gloves are definitely peccary. The quality of the ebay gloves is perhaps a little bit nicer than my Paul Stuart gloves. The stitching on the Pickett gloves is perhaps a little bit better than on the ebay gloves (which is not surprising, as they Pickett's are also completely hand stitched, and cost me $280) Quality of the leather seems comparable on all of them.

With regards to endangered species taxes, who knows? Is the peccary endangered? I have no idea. I'm no expert on CITES. I will say that I am extremely skeptical that any taxes paid are actually used to protect endangered species. Who are the taxes paid to? What do they do with them? I'll let the folks who are selling the goods worry about that.

 

[Renault78law]

Frankly, I'm a little surprised and appauled by the attitude of some on this board.
Nobody knows whether any laws are being broken with these gloves, but if there were, I would hope that forum members would respect them and not purchase from this seller.
Putting the responsibility solely on the exporter is doing nothing but hiding your head in the sand...and wilful ignorance is a valid defense to no law. It's true that it would be impossible to buy any imported product if the buyer had the responsibility to inquire into the circumstances under which the products were imported, however, now you have been made aware of the possibility of wrongdoing. Do you have a responsibility now? What if you were reasonably certain? More likely than not? Clear and convincing? Beyond a shadow of doubt? You'll have to draw the line somewhere...
Someone also alluded that they won't pay a tax unless there's a relationship between the tax and the harm. Even if the tax did nothing to help the species, taxes serve more than to remedy that specific harm. For example, many taxes exist for the sole purpose of detering socially undesirable behavior (hint).

I dont' mean to get on a high horse, nor do I purport to be an expert on the legality of the transaction at hand. All I want to say is, if it is in fact illegal, a socially resonsible person would think twice before buying.

 

[MikeF]

Putting the responsibility solely on the exporter is doing nothing but hiding your head in the sand...and wilful ignorance is a valid defense to no law. It's true that it would be impossible to buy any imported product if the buyer had the responsibility to inquire into the circumstances under which the products were imported, however, now you have been made aware of the possibility of wrongdoing. Do you have a responsibility now? What if you were reasonably certain? More likely than not? Clear and convincing? Beyond a shadow of doubt? You'll have to draw the line somewhere...

While wilful blindness is unlikely to provide a defence, the question will never arise for most of us on account of extra-territoriality. Believe me when I say that it's very difficult to comply with every law of every country simultaneously.

 

[jcusey]

Putting the responsibility solely on the exporter is doing nothing but hiding your head in the sand...and wilful ignorance is a valid defense to no law.

I'm not a lawyer, but I do know that US import law is exceedingly complex. If the law requires that I be an expert in its provisions and actively investigate whether every imported thing that I buy has been imported in compliance with them, the law is unreasonable and unjust. Throwing around cliches like "putting your head in the sand" and "wilful ignorance" wouldn't make it any less unreasonable and unjust.

It's true that it would be impossible to buy any imported product if the buyer had the responsibility to inquire into the circumstances under which the products were imported, however, now you have been made aware of the possibility of wrongdoing. Do you have a responsibility now?

No, some anonymous poster on a message board has written that some company that I've never heard of has told him that the import duty on peccary gloves is $100 per pair, and I have strong reason to think that that information is inaccurate. So what we have here is unreliable double anonymous hearsay. If I wrote I had heard that 15% of all merchandise in WalMart was imported illegally from Burma and had falsified country-of-origin labels on it, exactly what responsibility would that put on you?

What if you were reasonably certain? More likely than not? Clear and convincing? Beyond a shadow of doubt? You'll have to draw the line somewhere...

I don't know where the line is, but it's clearly nowhere close to this case.

Someone also alluded that they won't pay a tax unless there's a relationship between the tax and the harm. Even if the tax did nothing to help the species, taxes serve more than to remedy that specific harm. For example, many taxes exist for the sole purpose of detering socially undesirable behavior (hint).

That's not at all the argument that Kai made.

 

[kansen_leon]

I'm ordering a pair for next winter.  Of the alpaca or merino linings, which is better suited to a winter glove?  The description of alpaca sounds good (softer than cashmere, warmer than wool, etc.), but I'm not familiar with it and I don't know how warm it would be in comparison to merino.

dan

alpaca is WARM and SOFT (much better than cashemere and merino). Only many animal fibers on the world are thermoreguladors and alpaca is one of them. It's fiber has some kind of small airbags that lets air circulate inside it and mantains regulated body temperature (not very not nor cold). I hardly recommend alpaca lining, it's the andean treasure. Centuries ago, it was reserved only for royal use.