5 reasons to banish wool from our closet

“I have, I have, I have three sheep in a cabin. One gives me milk, another gives me wool, and another keeps me for the whole week.” Who has not hummed this letter during their childhood? This and other songs, as well as most of the information that we can find about animals in children’s content and even in textbooks, offer us this vision of them: they are here to give us things.

And they not only exist to give us things, but they do it with delight. This is how many advertisements show us and marketing campaigns in which animals are happily offered to us: cows cooking hamburgers, smiling chickens with trays of wings, pigs cutting ham… The advertising perversion knows no limits when it comes to marketing products of animal origin. Have you noticed?

What the wool industry won’t tell you

Yes there are a product about which there is real confusion it is the wool: soft sweaters, warm scarves, warm hats whose material evokes the bucolic image of peaceful flocks of sheep in the countryside, happy animals in the wild that from time to time are sheared “because they need it”.

The truth is that the wool we consume today has nothing to do with that representation that lives in the collective imagination, quite the contrary, it comes from an industry whose processes are extremely harmful to sheep. An industry in which these sensitive animals are terribly mistreated and used as mere production machines.

As information is power for change, we will see below 5 reasons to replace wool in our closets.

1. Genetically manipulated

The sheep would not need to be sheared if it weren’t for human intervention. Sheep naturally produce the amount of wool they need to protect themselves from extreme temperatures, both hot and cold.

For thousands of years, these animals have been genetically selected so that they produce a completely disproportionate and unnatural amount of wool, often reaching up to half their body weight.

2. Amputations during shearing

As is often the case in all animal exploitation industries, economic benefit is always above animal welfare. Wool production is no exception and shearers they are usually paid by the sheep, not by the hour.

This causes shearing to be carried out extremely quickly and normally. supposes that the sheep suffer injuries ranging from cuts in the skin to the accidental amputation udders, ears, penises and other parts of the body.

3. Violence and attacks

Sheep are extraordinarily sensitive and highly social animals that suffer great stress when they are removed from their groupso when they are led to the shearing stables, they are often terrified, resist and try to flee.

The PETA organization published in 2014 an investigation showing how sheep are routinely beaten, punched and kicked by operators to immobilize them, how they are violently thrown to the ground when they try to escape and how many of them come out of the shearing process with nosebleeds from the blows received.

4. Mulesing, torture in the name of production

Due to the genetic modification that sheep have undergone, their skin is extremely wrinkled: the more wrinkles, the more wool a single animal produces. But also more sweat and greater risk of infections.

In Australia, the largest producer of wool in the world, “mulesing” is common, a practice that consists of literally cutting off pieces of skin and meat of the zone that surrounds the anus of the lambs, to favor that the flies that deposit their larvae on the sweaty skin of the sheep, do it in that unprotected area and do not damage the rest of the wool. This is how they save veterinary expenses by directly mutilating the body of these sensitive animals.

Can you imagine one day after another with a raw wound?

5. Its effect on climate change

The wool industry not only harms animals, but also ecosystems. The excrements of these animals contribute significantly to the greenhouse effect, whose fermentation is equivalent to a quarter of methane emissions.

In New Zealand, methane emissions come mostly from sheep and are a 90% of greenhouse gas emissions greenhouse generated by the country.

The waste generated by the wool industry in countries like Australia, China or New Zealand, which are the main producers and exporters in the world, generates high levels of land and water pollutionbeing found in areas close to farms contamination levels that exceed sanitary standards.

As we can see, the reality of wool has nothing bucolic or natural for the more than billion sheep that are bred every year around the world for their production.

What can we do to help these helpless animals? Look at the labels and replace the wool in our garments by synthetic fabrics. Today we have at our disposal a wide range of textiles to protect us from the cold without harming animals or the environment.

Because the sheep do not give us wool, we take it from the sheep.