Weather app fail this morning, dressed for the -1 not so much for the torrent of rain that accompanied it mid-ride. Trousers soaked but lucky I had my merino wool base layers on held up enough on the water but more importantly the temperature. All hail, premium sheep hair!
Have you tried falling through ice into a river yet? Give it a shot, let me know how it goes. Get it completely saturated, and then hang out in sub-zero temperatures for a few hours or overnight. If you survive, try the same exercise in the same kind of layers of wool clothing.
Read what I actually said again: shearing is not INHERENTLY harmful. It can be harmful, on farms that are careless in their treatment of livestock. But how many videos do you think PETA is going to put on YouTube of sheep shearing that doesn’t hurt the sheep? Or do you think that maybe they’ll only post videos that reinforce their position?
We’re well past that point; they already exist. Are you suggesting that we should slaughter all of them…?
That’s not actually relevant to the production of wool though, is it? It’s utterly irrelevant to the wool; you could let the sheep graze and shear them annually, and allow them to die of natural causes, and it would make zero difference to the wool itself.
The vast majority of the microplastics that are going into everything on the planet are from synthetic fibers, particularly polyesters. (source) The product itself, not just the creation of the product, is harmful to the environment. Most synthetic fabrics degrade by breaking down into smaller fibers, rather than actually rotting away, so you get harm done at both ends of the produce. Natural fibers (and rayon, which is cellulose) will biodegrade completely over time. There is no way to mitigate the damages caused by microplastics; we don’t have an effective way of removing them from the environment. Conversely, carbon dioxide can be mitigated, by reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and by reforestation. (Although, TBH, we don’t mitigate it, and we’re already past the point of no return, so…)
…Except that these items are not comparable, because they perform differently under adverse conditions. The similarities are in the form, not the fiber. Sure, if the extent of your exposure to weather is walking to and from your car in the winter, you’re never going to notice a difference. If you go camping for a week in the Tetons in January, you absolutely WILL notice the difference. Cotton has to be heavily treated–with Teflon, with parafin or beeswax–in order to be water resistant; wool is naturally hydrophobic. That’s pretty important when you’re outdoors in cold weather.
I don’t know how my jacket is gonna stop my shoes from getting wet and causing my toes to freeze off in this case? But even if I personally don’t have the survival skills for that situation, I don’t think the jacket would be the issue, there is vegans climbing Mount Everest.
I never mentioned them. I was thinking like tutorial videos of how to shear sheep. It is almost never nice for the animal.
You’re saying this as if farmers aren’t going to slaughter them? If you would stop breeding animals the problem would be gone in 6 years (or 20 if you stop sending them to slaughter prematurely)
From your source: