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.
