Vegan Practically

Why do vegans avoid wool? This question comes up the way questions about eggs, dairy, or honey come up. Whether they’re genuinely curious or just trying to justify animal exploitation, people love to press about various animal products that, to them, seem harmless. The first response is that wool is an animal product and therefore not vegan. So if you’re vegan, you don’t wear wool.

But it’s not just a matter of being a consistent vegan. The wool industry is, indeed, an industry. As such, it involves industrial level farming of sheep. And intensive farming of sheep for the purposes of wool production is no less cruel than any other kind of factory farming of non-human animals. If you want to know how, read on.

First off, let’s deal with the suggestion that sheep are being done a favour because they need to be sheared. Sheep only need to be sheared because they are bred to produce more wool than they can naturally deal with. So the “sheep need to be sheared” point is like justifying the dairy industry by saying cows need to be milked. They do. But only because they are kept in a near-constant statue of pregnancy so as to produce milk, and only because their babies are taken away from them as soon as they are born.

Second, as with all factory farming, efficiency is the main priority. Lambs have holes punched in their ears, have their tails cut off, and the males are castrated all without anesthetic.

Third, there is the matter of mulesing. According to PETA: “In Australia, the most commonly raised sheep are merinos, specifically bred to have wrinkly skin, which means more wool per animal. This unnatural overload of wool causes animals to die of heat exhaustion during hot months, and the wrinkles also collect urine and moisture. Attracted to the moisture, flies lay eggs in the folds of skin, and the hatched maggots can eat the sheep alive. To prevent this so-called “flystrike,” Australian ranchers perform a barbaric operation—mulesing—or carving huge strips of flesh off the backs of lambs’ legs and around their tails. This is done to cause smooth, scarred skin that won’t harbor fly eggs, yet the bloody wounds often get flystrike before they heal.”

Because of the demands of high volume farming, shearers are paid by the hour. Rushing to shear as many sheep as possible, there is little regard for animal welfare. Indeed, eyewitnesses have said the shearing shed is one of the “worst places in the world for animal cruelty.”

Some might question whether all wool is produced under these conditions. Can there be humane wool producers? I would ask a different question: how many people even know where the wool they’re wearing comes from? Just as most of the animal products people eat come from factory farming (99%), so does most of the wool people wear. 50% of the world’s merino comes from Australia, where mulesing, castration, and the cutting off of tails are all common practices.

It’s not necessary to use wool. There are lots of alternatives to it, both synthetic and natural fibres. The yarn pictured is cotton, not wool, and made a lovely pair of little shoes for my grandson a couple of years ago.

It’s not simply that wool is to be avoided because it’s an animal product — though that is a good enough reason for quite a few people. But you might further ask: Why support a cruel industry?