The desire to adorn oneself and one’s surroundings is natural, universal, and age-old. While adorning oneself is not wrong in itself, when this external adornment comes at the price of pain to or even the life of another, a moral red flag ought to rise up.

This is what happens in adornment obtained from animals. Our attraction to the stunningly pretty colours, patterns, and textures that are found on many animals’ bodies turns into lust for acquiring them for no reason than to adorn ourselves. It is not to eat elephant’s meat that poachers kill the majestic yet gentle animal, it is to provide ivory for our objects of personal adornment. It is not to satisfy any survival need that we kill the harmless butterfly, it is for the visual pleasure of using them as pretty jewellery.

Nothing could probably be worse than the fate of the most loveable and cuddlesome creature children know – the soft snow white rabbit which pays the ultimate price for its silky fur by having its head cut off for us to have its fury skins flow around ours in a display of shameless vanity.

The 2026 calendar captures twelve such examples of animals that are used by humans for mere adornment, indisputably the least justifiable of human predations. Many such instances might come as a surprise to you despite (or maybe because of) how common their uses are and because many who wish well of animals frequently unknowingly use adornment trinkets made from animal body parts. The hope is that the pages of the calendar increase the viewer’s knowledge of this issue and cause a rethink on the ethics of using them.