Nephi used the skins of beasts to make a bellows (1 Nephi 17:11). When loading the ship they took "meat from the wilderness" (1 Nephi 18:6). According to Potter and Wellington, perhaps there is a distinction between these two. It is possible that "beasts" were not wild. Dhofar is the only place in Arabia, apart from modern air-conditioned farms, where cattle occur. The earliest settlers of Dhofar brought their cattle with them:
The pride and sustenance of these people was their cattle; their progress through the peninsula is marked by images of cattle they pecked on blackened rocks. . . . By the time they reached the Dhofar Mountains (the only place in Arabia where a cattle culture still survives), a group of these wanderers had most likely achieved a tribal identity, an identity that would become the people of 'Ad.
It might also have been that it was easier for Nephi to have purchased leather available for sale rather than to search for beasts, kill them, skin them and then make a bellows. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, p. 192]