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It feels really weird how you just uncritically talk about the wool industry. You also take it for granted that sheep need to keep being bred and shorn by humans. Their lives are not this idyllic romantic painting of the humble shepherd alone in a pasture, but one where their lives are only worth as much as their wool. Lambs are mutilated, and males castrated in horrific ways. The industry norm is speed over any care of the sheep and this is all completely unnecessary. You rightfully question how ethical human hair can be, but when it comes to animal welfare it's a footnote and written off as "some" rather than the industry as a whole.

Being the mouthpiece for propaganda about commodification of these animals is certainly a strange role to elect for yourself. They are not getting small cutting nicks, but large strips of their skin, their tail, and ears are removed during this process. Shearers punch the animals and stomp them into position. Sheep consistently get broken bones from how brutal the shearers are.

Though I guess Clara Parkes is right. It's truly the vegans who are unethical. What can we do but to shear the sheep? We certainly cannot stop breeding them because that might make us choose other materials, and that would be disastrous financially.

There is no way to ethically obtain wool.

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Thank you for this note- and thank you to everyone who responded below

My sincere apologies- I was not intending to say that the way that we currently manufacture wool on a mass scale is ethical. The goal was to draw a parallel with how we extract animal hair with how we could potentially extract human hair.

My sincere apologies and thank you for calling this out. I've added a little more disclaimer in the episode to make it clear that this was an unusual case study, and am inserting a little more information here in the newsletter about the dangers of the mass production of wool.

I'm a one man shop who is just trying to do the best she can, and I don't always get it right. Thank you for being understanding, and thank you for your help. It's a constant learning process for me too.

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Oct 12, 2023Liked by Articles Of Interest

Avery, thank you very much for being willing to listen, and for adding that disclaimer to the newsletter. ❤️ Most people don’t fully understand how wool is made, and for good reason— they don’t want you to know! I imagine that’s why all the farms you contacted wouldn’t let you come visit in the first place.

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I came to these comments to also share my 🤨 sheep feelings, but I see it's abundantly expressed. I commend you actually responding and making changes. I really respect that. Thank you.

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i am vegan (diet-wise) but definitely own some secondhand wool items (and generally have some work to do in the fashion department when it comes to veganism/animal cruelty). Agree that there is a big chasm between the shearing that would occur in a museum/showcase farm and what typically occurs in a factory situation. the shearers are usually paid by the pound of wool, so there is no incentive to take time or do the job “nicely” (if that is possible, there is still a lot to understand about animal sentience so it seems weird to assume that they like it). I see the point that humans breeding sheep that need to be shorn puts us in a sort of double-bind (that was an interesting fact that i learned in the podcast!), but just because we don’t currently have a good solution for that doesn’t mean that we should jump to the conclusion that the wool industry is ethical. Just because there needs to be better alternatives doesn’t make the way we do things “good”

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Thank you so much for saying this! The podcast acknowledges how stressful having that much wool and then getting it shorn off is for the sheep. (It made no mention of mulesing and the other horrors that go down on sheep farms.) The solution is not to continue to breed more of these individuals into existence. These kinds of sheep, like bulldogs, were never meant to be, and those unlucky enough to be born in those bodies suffer their whole lives. The truly ethical solution is to let them die out while we shift our focus to kinder, more sustainable materials.

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