Perpetual Yelling

I managed to finish my Wayside Lace Cardigan two days ago and I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I could wash it already and luckily the yogurt didn’t leave any stains behind.

So one of the things that PETA uses as an example of why wool is cruel is something called mulesing.  Mulesing is the removal of wool bearing strips of skin around the buttocks.  But here’s the thing… it’s only done to prevent a parasitic infection called Myiasis or Flystrike.  That’s right… Mulesing is a medical treatment.

Medical treatments don’t look pretty.  No one’s putting the video of their colonoscopy or mammogram (the boob masher, in my mother’s terminology) on their dating profile and claiming how cute or hot they look.  Yes a medical exam doesn’t look creepy.  But just about all medical treatments look nasty as hell.  Taking a date to a gynecologist so they can watch you get a pap smear just isn’t going to set the loins on fire. Yet no matter how ugly medical treatments look, we still do them because we understand that they are necessary evils.

The same is true about mulesing.  The National Farmers Federation says that “mulesing remains the most effective practical way to eliminate the risk of ‘flystrike’ in sheep” and that “without mulesing up to 3,000,000 sheep a year could die a slow and agonising death from flystrike”.  Pretty?  Nope.  Necessary? Oh yeah.

As I said in my previous post about PETA, a fiber farmer is HEAVILY invested in the health and well being of their animals for the simple reason that an animal that isn’t happy and healthy can’t produce a sellable product.  The following is a list of resources on how to prevent tender, or breaking fleece.  All of these verify the necessity of a fiber animal being happy and healthy, with a stress free life, and a high quality diet.  All off them verify that an animal going through a period of stress of any kind produces a fiber that breaks.

From the California Wool Growers Association

From the Australian Department of Agriculture

From a book called Running a Small Flock of Sheep by David G. Henton

From an article on Hobby Farms on growing quality fleece

A sheep, prior to sheering, is carrying around five to ten pounds of some of the best insulator in the world.  So that’s five to ten pounds of holding in heat.  What’s more, the naturally occurring lanolin that occurs in their fiber (Think of our hair oils.  Natural.  Normal.  Unpreventable.) has the consistency of beeswax.  Beeswax traps a whole lot of crap.  Well, lanolin too.  It traps in and holds on to plant matter, dirt, and even feces.  A rough fleece can be a pretty nasty thing to work with.  They’re stinky and so dirty that the white parts are frequently brown.  Not kidding.  I’ve got a bag of rough fleece I’d be glad to show you.

Because of the sheer weight, because of the trapped bacteria, because of the added stress of all of this on the animal’s system, sheering is not only lacking in cruelty, it’s a necessary medical treatment for the animal’s well being.  Even meat sheep get sheered.  In fact, last year a sheep in Australia was found wandering around with a ginormous fleece, the world’s record, even bigger than Shrek’s.  And the sheering saved it’s life.  That one can be seen here.