Opera Dress

This fake yarn is supposedly better for sheep.

Aimed at people who don’t know where wool comes from, it’s 100% plastic. Yes, plastic.

So any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

You’re supposed to believe that sheep shearing is violent and cruel. There are imbeciles out there that work in an unprofessional manner while shearing, but that’s not the case overall.

Sheep don’t suffer from having their fleece removed.

Left on, the fleece can become a home for fly eggs and the subsequent maggots which can eat the sheep. Chemical treatments are available to prevent that happening. It’s much better for the sheep, the land and the farmer to avoid chemical use.

Don’t be fooled. Wool is a sustainable material, one we should make more and better use of.

Any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

This is very important.

And you need to wash acrylic wool garment more often than natural wool. They get stinky way more easily.

In my almost-decade of owning sheep, there have been exactly two(2) bad shearers try to start up in the area. Know what happened? The first farm they went to called every other shepherd in the area and said “This guy cut one of my sheep and didn’t think it was a big deal, don’t hire him.” And neither of them ever did business in the area again.

Some farmers are less conscientious than they should be about taking care of their stock, and the occasional tiny nick will happen, but no one is going to hire a shearer who is a) incompetent enough and b) uncaring enough to actually injure the animals to the point of bleeding, let alone the kind of horrors the internet claims.

Also, most breeds of sheep will literally die if they go too long without being sheared. PETA (and let’s face it, most of this anti-wool stuff can be traced back to deliberate misinformation from PETA) doesn’t care if sheep die, they have openly stated that they would prefer every domestic species that can no longer survive without humans go extinct rather than live in “"slavery.”“

Humans and sheep have lived together for over ten thousand years, they’ve been domesticated longer than dogs! Their lives consist of doing whatever the heck they want (for the most part they only want to walk, eat, sleep, play, and make lambs) while being fed and cared for, for the low price of having their hair cut once a year. Why would anyone boycott this natural, biodegradable fiber humans have been using for so long to the benefit of both species, in favor of plastics that are killing the planet??

Also loving the “the sheep will be snuggly warm tonight” like… You shear sheep in the spring, when the weather warms up and they no longer need it, and they grow it back for next winter.

Also, you literaly NEED to shear sheep multible times a Year or they fucking Overheat and die in their own wool

Twee, deliberate mislabelling which appeals to kind-hearted people who know nothing about how the real thing is produced.

On the funnier side, ignorance about anything closer to nature than a supermarket shelf can result in gems like this one:

Regular yogurt for me.  Thanks.

(As for ignorance, this post is epic and getting more so every time I see it.)

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Back on topic.

Shearing’s not skinning and it’s not painful, unless some guy getting busy with a manscaping clipper means he’s flaying himself alive.

Shearing is an all-over haircut, call it sheepscaping if need be though expect some odd looks, and good shearers - as @ruusverd​ said, bad shearers earn a bad rep and soon earn no more money - will leave less nicks on an entire sheep than I might inflict on my face if I forget to change my razor-blade. 

That’s pretty impressive when dealing with a notoriously dimwit animal that doesn’t understand “now just sit still for a minute” and finds “see that open gate, go through it” a difficult concept. (Going through an unexpected hole in the hedge, however, is something sheep do with great ease and willingness, especially if there’s a soon-to-be-ex herb garden on the far side…)

“All warm and snuggly in their woolly jumpers…” Oh puh-leeze. A jumper is a garment which can be taken off and put on as required. A sheep’s fleece is nothing of the sort. Ireland’s just had a heatwave, so which of these two would have been more comfortable the other day when it was 30°C / 90°F in the shade?

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But look at the blood! goes the outcry about sheep with red stains. Here’s what that “blood” is. Unless the outcriers believe the front half is royal and bleeds blue, it’s just dye.

Why dye? There are various reasons: to show who owns which sheep in a mixed flock of the same breed, or to indicate if one has been dosed with something, or to mark if a ewe has mated with a ram.

The ram wears a harness - AFAIK not black leather with chrome studs, at least not on any farm near here - which holds a dye-pad on his chest. After he’s done his business, the hopefully-preggers ewe will have a patch of that dye on her rump as in the photo.

Different colours let the farmer know which ram’s been busy if there’s more than one, or with one ram, on what day the mating occurred so they can calculate when to expect lambs. That kit suggests rams get one day a week off…

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Besides shearing sheep to stop them overheating, if the weather is rainy rather than sunny they’ll still need sheared to stop them getting waterlogged.

A waterlogged sheep is a top-heavy sheep, and since rainy weather will have made the ground slippery, a top-heavy sheep can all too easily become a sheep on its back - a broad, flat back that won’t roll - unable to get upright.

Sheep internal organs aren’t meant to be upside down and inversion will eventually kill them, if they’re not gutted by a fox first. Crows will have had their eyes long before then.

Forget deceitful propaganda about fake wool, here’s some REAL advice about how to do a sheep a (literal) good turn.

I’ve done it myself, and though she’d already lost one eye - hoodie crows don’t miss a chance - that ewe survived and next spring produced what I was told were two fine lambs. I felt pretty good about that.

I still do.

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This is what shearing really looks like, and that’s not the behaviour of an animal in distress or pain. Baffled, maybe, but any human whose haircut started with a judo throw would be baffled too..

The end result is a 12lb / 5.5kg load of insulation which the sheep no longer has to carry about. How’d you like being stuck inside that lot on a hot day?

The “shearing is cruel” fruitloops rely on deliberate lies, gullibility and lack of knowledge. Be aware.

 Or maybe…

I will add that rare and vanishing breeds of sheep are often only saved from extinction because shepherds are able to sell their wool. The Livestock Conservancy has a whole program to conserve rare sheep breeds with the slogan “Shave ‘Em To Save ‘Em.”

And fun fact—actual fun fact, not my usual grotesque fun facts!—Beatrix Potter the children’s author was deeply dedicated to preserving an old breed of sheep called the Herdwick, and left four thousand acres to the National Trust on the condition that they continue to be used to graze Herdwicks in perpetuity.

This whole thread is great, but to be extremely pedantic about it, dogs were domesticated earlier at 15,000 years ago. Many livestock species were domesticated around the same time about 10,000 years ago when humans started doing more agriculture.

Fun fact, pigeons were probably also domesticated around 10k years ago

But I really do dislike how much veganism-the-ideology has taken over the discussion on climate change and how to fix our foodways, for reasons that include but are certainly not limited to:

Here’s a project I’ve been working on for a few months with forest expert (also my sister-in-law), Monica Allaby. Monica had the idea to make a zine about New Brunswick’s very special forest (which is being ravaged by bad logging practices) and her relationship to it. She came to me with this beautiful piece of writing as well as a bunch of photographs. I helped to fine tune the writing a little and then made illustrations based on the photos. The result is this 20-page zine which I’m really excited to finally be able to share with you! Thanks so much, Monica, for letting me be a part of this project! 

Alexandra Sipa, a UK-based Romanian fashion designer, has found an innovative use for discarded electrical wires – creating beautiful garments and accessories. Sipa is a recent fashion graduate from London’s artsy Central Saint Martins University. The 23-year-old was inspired to start the project after her earphones broke several times. She…

I understand why people dislike leather and animal products. But leather is such a good resource? Like… My mom bought a sturdy leather coat in 1989. I’m in my 20’s and I now wear that coat. That’s a 30 year old coat? 30 years, two generations, one coat. Versus, like… A plastic one, that rips and gets thrown out, or releases bits into the ecosystem every time it’s washed, takes a billion years to decompose, lasts maybe a decade if you’re super duper careful, and uses oil products in it’s construction. Like, yeah leather is expensive and comes from a living animal, and I’m not saying that you should go out and buy fifty fur and leather products for the he’ll of it, but like… Maybe the compromise is worth it? One animal product, valued and respected and worn down for generations, versus like… Six plastic products that will never ever go away?

idk, I could be wrong.

this is why im so fucking pissed white colonial fucks and white vegans get so enraged at indigenous people for using hides/leather and animal bones as if that shit breaks or rips like cheap polyester does

Remember, kids:

It’s not “vegan wool”, it’s plastic.

It’s not “vegan leather”, it’s plastic.

It’s not “vegan fur”, it’s fucking plastic. It’s all plastic.

It’s all fucking plastic, and every time you wash it, or damage it, or try to dispose of it, that plastic winds up in the water, in the earth, in the air.

Hell, the damage has already done when the fucking thing’s been made. As the OP says, it’s all oil and oil products; it creates pollution just to produce synthetic fabrics and materials, even before you try to throw them away, which, I mean, good luck with that.

A lot of vegan ideology is built up around a very superficial set of ethics that are supposedly about protecting animals, wildlife and the environment, but they fall apart when you look even a little bit below the surface. Every time you eschew an animal-based product in favour of something “synthetic” for the sake of “saving an animal’s life”, you’re creating pollution and trash that won’t go away for thousands of years, damaging the Earth and making life so much worse for countless animals and people.

Think about this stuff more than not at all, please.

Eeeeeeverybody loves to get up my asshole because I wear fur. Yeah? Okay then.

When you live somewhere with -40C winter temperatures, you realize that pragmatism and warmth trump all other considerations.

I’m in and out of cars and buildings all day, every day. I have to dress for the weather and fur is hands down one of the warmest things you can wear — ask the fucking Inuit.

So you know what I do?

I check consignment stores. I check estate auctions. I get family heirloom furs.

I buy furs that are literally older than I am, in styles that would consign them to the dumpster, and then get them tailored to fit. My fur earmuffs? Salvaged fur from a coat that was ripped and functionally useless. My fur short coat? A fur that got raggedy and moth-eaten at the bottom and so was hemmed to hip height. My long fur coat is almost fifteen years older than I am, and I’m thirty one years old. Do that math.

So yes. I wear fur, because it fits my needs, my budget, and my ethics. The vegans wearing pleather can kick a brick. Only one of our coats is going to destroy the planet, and it isn’t my grandmother’s mink stole.

Not to mention the fact that buying these natural leather products from indigenous peoples both subverts capitalism (that wants you to buy cheap shit that breaks), and also supports indigenous communities and artisans.

I’m reading the notes and it’s really cute when people go “but use hemp! Use cotton! Try linen!”

Yeah?

Imma wear linen when the weather looks like this:

I am NOT going to wear hemp, linen or cotton when the weather looks like this:

When the weather outside is frightful, I’mma make like an Inuit and dress like this:

(Also, as you say: it is possible to responsibly source ethical furs. I prefer furriers like Victoria Kakuktinniq, who is an Indigenous Inuit fashion designer who interprets traditional fur designs for a modern sensibility. The funds from her clothing — and from other northern Indigenous communities — allows those northern communities to maintain their cultural traditions, while also introducing a much-needed revenue stream. If you have to buy fresh fur, Indigenous furriers are a good bet!)

@acti-veg this is just…. *sigh*

Which part is *passive aggressive sigh*?

Would it be the:

-reuse of fabrics and furs that are generally anywhere from 10-50 years old?

-recycling and repurposing of old or otherwise unusable materials like leather and fur to make smaller items like jackets, vests, gloves, hats and balaclavas?

-support for Indigenous traditions, handicrafts and artisans?

-recognition of the fact that there are very few plant-based products that will stand up to winters where the average temperature is anywhere from -20 to -50

I know, I know. Your ethics are itchy and it’s very simple to talk that good shit.

But let me introduce you to a Canadian phenomena: frostbite.

Frostbite occurs when your cells freeze. Your cells.

Ice crystals begin to form in cells in temperatures lower than -4C, which is what Canadians call “spring, fucking finally”.

In the teeth of winter, you get maybe ten hours of sunlight a day and your highest temperature is still double digits below 0C and the weather channel is saying “WEATHER WARNING: skin freezing in 30SECONDS”, and the government has put out a WEATHER EMERGENCY: EXTREME COLD WARNING.

When the weather is that severe, we don’t actually get the luxury of waxed cotton, woollen peacoats and a few layers of linen.

Sanctimony and sighs and good intentions don’t keep us warm.

Seriously, it hit -50F here last winter, linen and cotton don’t do fuckall in those temps.

Well, that’s not true. They DO, actually. They get wet from sweat and then get clammy and suck the heat out of you, leading to frostbite. Polyester is plastic, and I avoid that, because it’s bad for the environment.

You know what actually keeps you warm when it hits -50F? Wool, fur, and down. All animal products, all renewable and biodegradable, and all of which will last years with proper care.

I have two fur coats, both of which I paid $20 or less for at thrift stores, and both of which are vintage. Wool doesn’t harm the sheep it’s sheared from…they need to be sheared to stay healthy, actually…and down is harvested from animals that will be eaten, meaning none of the animal goes to waste.

Ah, yes. Truely, sheep live terribly. (Note; sheep wool is useless unles they have good pasture they’re raised on)

Ah, yes, the sheep are so mistreated when they’re sheared. A whole four minutes and they’re done. It’s like giving a fussy toddler a haircut.

And if they’re NOT shorn, you get flystrike, which I’m not going to post a pic of here because it is very unpleasant. Basically, flies lay eggs on the thick wool and the larvae eat the sheep’s skin off. It can be fatal.

https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/health-welfare/livestock-diseases/parasitic-diseases/fly-strike-warning-warm-wet-weather-continues

But please, tell me, the granddaughter of farmers who lives in farm country and who has neighbors who keep sheep, how sheep work.

Hi I’m the OP and I grew up dirt poor on a Canadian sheep farm and I support this message

To even pull away from cold weather folks, my people are all from Texas and Louisiana and leather is 100% useful for so many things. Tanned hides were a common good for us and surrounding tribes because they’re fucking awesome when it comes to rain protection, provide quick shade in the heat, and were a great way to protect your ass when riding an animal.

Tanned hides work great as a base for moccasins, because it’s thick enough to protect your feet from the heat of the packed dirt, and thin enough that your feet don’t sweat to death inside of them. In boots, I don’t trust any material that isn’t leather or reptile skin to protect me from animals or the elements.

Y’all really need to look at your anti fur/leather/wool campaigns and recognize the anti-Indigenous sentiment that runs through all of them.

All of this. I echo all of this. This is part of the reason why I don’t agree with veganism for ethical reasons.