16 Things You Need to Know About Wool
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WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IMAGES ARE GRAPHIC (NSFW) AND WILL MAKE YOU REFUSE TO WEAR WOOL EVER AGAIN.
1. About 25 percent of the world’s wool comes from Australia.
2. Young lambs’ ears are hole-punched, their tails are chopped off, and the males are castrated, all usually without anesthetics or pain relief.
3. It is considered “normal” in the Australian wool industry for approximately 3 million young lambs to die every spring.
4. Lambs sometimes die because of poor nutrition.
5. This wound is the result of a process called “mulesing,” and it’s standard practice in the industry.
6. During “mulesing,” workers carve huge strips of skin off the backs of lambs’ legs and around their tails.
7. Or workers attach vise-like clamps to their flesh until it dies and sloughs off.
8. In the rush to produce more wool, many sheep die from exposure after premature shearing.
9. An unnatural overload of wool also causes animals to die of heat exhaustion during hot months.
10. During shearing, sheep can sustain anything from nicks to complete amputations of their udders, ears, penises, and other body parts.
11. Eyewitness: “I have seen shearers punch sheep with their shears or their fists until the sheep’s nose bled. I have seen sheep with half their faces shorn off.”
12. During auction, the pens are crowded and sheep may die because of injuries or stress.
13. When sheep age and their wool production declines, they are sent to slaughter.
14. Millions of live sheep are shipped from Australia to the Middle East and North Africa every year.
15. A 2005 report stated that about 38,000 sheep died in transit. In most cases, their carcasses were thrown overboard.
16. Nearly 50% of all of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from the agricultural sector, which includes the wool industry.
It’s clear that cruelty to sheep is rampant in the wool industry, no matter where it comes from or what assurances the companies and the industry give. Please, help sheep now by refusing to buy wool. It’s easy to check the label when you’re shopping. If it says “wool,” just leave it on the shelf.
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