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Wool farming, if done with an eye on animal welfare*, does absolutely nothing to harm a sheep or alpaca. It’s no different than a haircut. And just like a haircut, it’ll grow right back. If your argument is that sheep may be cut in this process—very occasionally a sheep may be nicked. To be clear, I say NICKED, not cut. Think about shaving your legs or face and hitting a bump, and ow, you bleed a couple drops. That is what may, rarely, happen. But RARELY, because farmers are going to take damn good care of the animals who keep them in funds. Should it happen, it’s as much an accident as you finding that bump while shaving.

Likewise y’all should be promoting ethical beekeeping and honey farming. Bees are unique among livestock in that if they don’t like their keeper, if they think the hive is shitty, they can, and will, just…leave. You can’t put a collar or ear tag on a bee. Bee populations are declining and they’re incredibly important in our biodiversity (as pollinators, yes, but also in other ways). And bees do, indeed, make too much honey for themselves. That’s why they swarm. A nest gets too full of comb, or they outgrow it, and they just dip. Swarming is dangerous because it leaves the bees vulnerable—the queen is mostly unprotected, they have only as much food as they could carry with them so if it’s late in the season they’re dead meat, humans spot swarms and freak out and send exterminators because they don’t realize swarms aren’t dangerous as long as you’re calm….it is, BY FAR, better to have bees in a hive that never overfills, where they can be checked for parasites and diseases that would destroy the colony or even an entire apiary and can receive honey substitute rather than starving to death if winter should be particularly harsh or long, and where an excess of their natural product and instincts can be siphoned off for the benefit of humans with no detriment to the bees.

Honey is less harmful to us and to the planet we live on than agave syrup, stevia, or cane sugar. It does not rely on any kind of slave labor (again: if the bees weren’t happy, they’d leave). It does not upset entire economies. And by its nature there are more independent keepers than there are giant conglomerates, which is better all the way around! (Although the conglomerates are trying to change that, so like. Support your local beekeepers.) Plus, old no-longer-needed honeycomb is made of beeswax, which can be used in all manner of things in lieu of more harmful chemicals like phthalates. There is no downside here!

“Never do anything involving an animal ever” should not be the goal. That completely ignores that we are animals that grew up in a complete ecosystem. “Do the least amount of harm and be good stewards, because this planet doesn’t belong to only us” should be the goal.

Wool and honey. We can argue another time about eggs. For right now let’s agree that sheep, goats, alpacas, and bees make far more of these products than they will ever need, that in some cases an excess can even be detrimental to them, and that it is a GOOD THING to find a way to live in balance rather than poisoning our world with “vegan leather.”

“Look for lumps,” they said, “watch out for unusual lumps and discharge.”

They did NOT say, “By the way, some areolas have little bumps on them. And some get pimple-ish things around the edges. Or on the nipples. These are not the lumps we are talking about, and that is not the discharge we are talking about.”

That distinction cleared so much up for me, like, breast tissue is all lumps and bumps normally (which is what mamories feel like to me). What the hell do they mean by lumps????