I want to preemptively clarify that I do NOT buy wool new, thrift wool, wear wool that I owned before I went vegan, or plan on ever buying wool again. Okay the question:
I agree that it is immoral to use animals as products but I was wondering if anyone could outline how eliminating wool will work?
I think it’s terrible that humans have bred sheep to produce so much wool that they overheat and have joint issues but I’m not sure what we should do now that this is the reality. Sheep sanctuaries? Re -selectively breeding sheep to not produce as much wool? I want to hear people’s thoughts.
Not wearing the wool you owned before going vegan feels very performative. If you don’t wanna thrift it then no harm no foul but you already own it. If you don’t support thrifting it then donating it seems inconsistent with your views. It’s just gonna end up in the trash or collecting dust which feels pointless. You’re not actually doing anything to target the wool industry or protect sheep by not wearing it.
I get where you’re coming from but personally it just feels gross to me when I think about how it was produced. I also don’t wear leather that I owned previously because I don’t want to project a message (wearing animal skin) that I don’t agree with.
I see what you’re saying but my question would be is: is veganism about presenting a certain image or disruption of the meat industry? I understand where you’re coming from tho and if your answer is both then I’d say fair enough
Veganism is about ending animal murder and exploitation + saving the environment. Because I believe that vegans are obligated to spread this message to others I think that contradicting my own beliefs (such as “animals are not commodities”) in my day to day life would be hypocritical, hence the emphasis on “message”.
Then it's not about the animal, but about your feeling. That's the definition of performative.
Performative means "done or expressed insincerely or inauthentically, typically with the intention of impressing others or improving one's own image."
I agree OP is being a bit silly but I believe they sincerely feel this and the general population doesn't like vegans much, I don't think they aren't wearing it to improve their reputation.
They literally said they don’t want to project message that wearing animal skin (is okay).
As someone who still wears their leather and wool items that’s a completely valid point and not performative. It’s similar to not eating a piece of meat that someone is about to otherwise throw in the trash.
No, it means it's not grounded in logic. Performative means it's about how other people perceive them.
I have a similar stance. I wear the animal products I already own rather than throw them away or give them away and then have to participant in subpar alternatives or contribute to mass consumerism, which has its own environmental and ethical complications.
If you found a human-skin jacket and you chose to not wear it because you find that terrible, would you also say that is "performative"?
If I found a human skin jacket I would call the police and hope they can stop Ed Gein 2.
Can you try again and this time not not dodge the question? Would you consider it ethical or unethical to wear said jacket?
I won’t say ethical but I won’t say unethical. I call it ethically neutral. I wouldn’t personally because I would immediately become a suspect for a litany of crimes
There’s no such thing as ethically neutral it either is or isn’t ethical.
Not wearing it because you don’t want to be a suspect for crimes is not touching on the ethical aspect so it sounds like you consider it ethical.
What if I donate my own skin with the express consent that I want someone to wear it as a cool jacket? Like if I was legitimately terminal, did everything legally
You don’t have to convince me, I don’t see an ethical issue with wearing one that you find on the side of the street. On an unrelated note I always thought leather jackets were lame they’re too try hard.
Get this man some Reddit gold
Sheep breeding is a pretty human intensive project, they have to mark the ram and all the ewes he's mounted. It would be pretty easy to just keep the sexes separated and just not breed more sheep. I wish there was a really good alternative to wool. I love fiber arts. But processing and doing and working with plant based fibers is really challenging to do at home. So, I mostly don't do much of that anymore.
this just seems like a variation on the question of 'what would happen to all the chickens in cages if everyone became vegan??' -- the thing is, things take time to transition, and the lifespan of a sheep, or a chicken, is very short. typically in the months, not the years. the transition to the world being vegan is going to take decades, perhaps hundreds of years. far beyond the lifespan of any one chicken or sheep. so what will happen is that over time, fewer and fewer sheep and chickens will be bred. the number of them is sharply tied to market forces. the demand determines how many of them are living, especially when they have lifespans like 18 months or 6 years. by comparison, i became vegan in 2018, 7 years ago. i've been vegan longer than any pig, cow, chicken, sheep, or turkey (in animal agriculture i mean, not the ones that are pets) has been alive. most animals are not alive long enough to worry about what will happen to them if everyone suddenly became vegan, because the world is not going to suddenly become vegan within the lifespan of a sheep. hundreds of generations of sheep will be bred, born, and die, in the time it'll take before even the majority of humans are vegan.
Sheep do not live for months. If they did we wouldn't have a word for one year old sheep (and would not consider it young for sheep). They live for ten to twelve years. Pigs live for up to twenty-seven years, cows live for fifteen to twenty years, and chickens and turkeys can live up to a decade, although generally closer to seven or eight years. Especially when it comes to sheep, which are generally not killed prematurely in agriculture (wool sheep that is, not meat sheep), you have not been vegan longer than any sheep has been alive.
I don't realistically think this will happen, or at least not for hundreds of years, but I think it's a similar answer to ending other animal industries: stop breeding sheep and let them naturally peter out. It wouldn't be that simple in reality, for example we would have to find a way to house and care for the remaining sheep which would be a huge challenge. But that's the most basic idea
So extinction is your best option?
Kind of. Nothing against very small scale pets that are just there to have a nice life and die of old age. Only healthy breeds of course. SImply ask yourself: What is the point of the conservation of a sick species?
Yup, continuing to breed wool sheep is like breeding purebred dogs. They're "cute", they're interesting historically and scientifically, they're living artifacts of an age old industry... but specifically they're living artifacts of an age old industry which we want to end.
We're talking about animals that don't exist naturally. Domesticated sheep are so far removed from their wild ancestors that they don't have a place in any ecosystem, and they are unable to survive without human intervention (sheep have been selectively bred to produce so much wool that it is literally deadly to not shear them).
What alternative do you recommend?
Whom would it hurt?
Best answer I've heard from anyone for answering these questions is that, in practical terms, veganism is unlikely to grow so fast that we have an instant crisis of animals abandoned by industry. If and when we reach a point at which we see large numbers of abandoned animals, that would be a time to try and mass invest in sanctuaries, to grow the limited sanctuaries we have now for rescue animals into essentially animal retirement homes, likely staffed by vegans who had previously worked in animal-related industries. The cost of industries transferring care of the animals to sanctuaries would have to be lower than the cost of slaughter, or there would have to be laws in place prohibiting culling of that nature.
In the case of sheep specifically, they would of course have to be shorn still (thus why it would be good to have vegan ex-shepherds/ranchers working with them). As for what to do with all that wool, probably the most strictly vegan thing to do would be composting for recycling in some fashion, but personally I wouldn't be opposed to it being sold to help fund the sanctuaries, so long as there is oversight to ensure that the mission remains first and foremost to treat the animals with compassion, and find some way to avoid the potential perverse incentive for these sanctuaries to just functionally become a greenwashed wool farm.
Most likely sanctuaries of this nature will have to sterilize the majority of animals they take in, it might seem dark but it would be crueller to keep propagating animals that have been bred into tortured lives simply for posterity's sake.
In any case, all this is again predicated on veganism growing extremely fast. We would have to have a strong and undeniable upward trend for animal industries to so much as slow down breeding under replacement levels, for them to start abandoning livestock to sanctuaries would require nothing short of a miraculous rate of mass conversion to our way of life.
Of all the main animal products (leather, wool, food) I find wool to be the one with the weakest efforts at making substitute products that aren’t just plastic (if you’re ok wearing fleece - problem solved). As far as I can tell, wool is the ONLY natural product that insulates well when wet. Cotton, bamboo viscose, hemp, whatever - they don’t work for cold weather outdoor fabrics.
I wish there was some effort in this field. I have zero personal interest in lab grown meat (while I understand it could be crucial to get to a more vegan world), I wish there were research on plant based warm weather clothing.
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Its more ethical to wear what you have instead of letting it go to waste.
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Stop breeding them, send the survivors to sanctuaries, rewild the land to support wild species that have been wiped out by sheep farming.
The real answer to this question is that these animals will never actually go extinct. Best case scenario is that the majority of the population goes vegan. There is no future where 100% of the population goes vegan. Even if every county in the entire world made it illegal which tbh that still would probably never happen.
Same thing that happens to literally any animals when the world goes vegan. wool sheep aren't any different
the demand for animal products declines and less and less sheep are bred. eventually there are no sheep being bred anymore. voila