Animal Welfare and the Wool Industry
The term wool can be used to describe the hair taken from sheep, Tibetan antelope and goats and includes cashmere, pashmina, mohair and merino. Taking wool from any of these animals causes harm to them in some way.
In Australia, there are particular issues of animal welfare surrounding the farming of merino sheep. The sheep have wrinkly skin giving more wool per animal. Australia produces 30 percent of all wool used worldwide with a large proportion of it coming from merino sheep. The wrinkled skin of the sheep can cause them to overheat and die and also collects moisture and urine attracting flies. The flies lay eggs in the folds and the resulting maggots eat the sheep alive. To prevent this happening the farmers use a barbaric practice called Mulesing which involves cutting away the folds of skin around their tail area with no pain relief. Lambs also have their tails chopped off and are castrated without anaesthetics. many sheep die each year from disease, lack of shelter and neglect.
This video details just some of the horror of practices in the Australian wool industry.
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Other abuses in the wool industry include killing of 50 - 80% of cashmere goats because of defects in their coats, keeping angora rabbits in cages that damage their feet and painful shearing, the killing of Tibetan antelope to make shahtoosh shawls and the neglect of alpaca as a result of the wool industry.
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