CLOAKED IN MALICE: Farmed animals and the greenwashing of wool
Like all industries that mass produce animals, the sheep industry is egregiously cruel and polluting. Wool producers are embracing the same greenwashing diversions as the meat industry with the misleading claim of 'regenerative wool', and are doing sheep a favor by shearing off their hair. Thus, in the minds of many consumers, wool shearing is widely misperceived as merely a benign 'haircut' for sheep.
MARINA BOLOTNIKOVA: There is one big domain of livestock production that is often seen as exempt from the hard trade-offs of farming animals for human consumption: animals raised for clothing, like the more than 1.2 billion sheep farmed for wool, or the tens of millions of cows whose skin is processed into leather. Both species, as ruminants, emit massive volumes of methane (the potent greenhouse gas that is responsible for about a quarter of global warming) and take up vast land areas that could otherwise host native, carbon-sequestering ecosystems.
According to one analysis of wool production in Australia, by far the world’s top exporter, the wool required to make one knit sweater is responsible for 27 times more greenhouse gases than a comparable Australian cotton sweater, and requires 247 times more land. Sheep farming threatens native species around the world, from koalas in Australia to sage grouse in the US. Domesticated sheep in the American West have, as my colleague Paige Vega has reported, been implicated in mass die-offs of their wild cousins, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, through the spread of the lethal pathogen Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae…
Yet animal-based textiles benefit from a natural, planet-friendly image. It’s still common to see media and the industry itself misleadingly report that animal-based fabrics are just a byproduct of meat production that would otherwise be thrown in the trash and that it’s better for the environment to use them — a claim that obfuscates the economy of animal production.
“Wool and leather are not byproducts of meat production, they’re co-products: producers support their livestock operations by selling meat as well as wool and hides, all of which keeps them afloat,” Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, told me in an email…
Although wool shearing is widely misperceived as merely a benign “haircut” for sheep, the modern sheep industry, like all industries that mass produce animals, is egregiously violent. Sheep are subjected to painful mutilations like tail docking and mulesing, a procedure in which skin from their hindquarters is cut off to prevent flystrike, a parasitic infection the animals are prone to because of how they’ve been bred…
In the minds of many consumers, the wool industry has naturalized itself with the idea that we’re doing sheep a favor by shearing off their hair, a myth so persistent that it’s become lodged in the minds of even some people who think about animal ethics for a living. “Sheep that are not regularly shorn, as they’ve now evolved to be, suffer from having their heavy coat dragging them down,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who recently wrote a book on what we owe nonhuman animals, told the Boston Review in defense of wool earlier this year.
Nussbaum’s account has it entirely backward. Sheep were bred by humans to overproduce hair, they didn’t evolve that way — and unlike wild animals, domesticated sheep don’t simply reproduce without human management. They’re products, brought into the world by agribusiness according to demand for their hair, milk, and meat, and with exactly as much regard for their welfare as will maximize profit. We could choose to simply stop breeding them and restore native ecosystems in their place…
It’s “a mass-market commodity that operates stealthily under many layers of mythology, from legends of the golden fleece to bucolic images of sheep peacefully grazing in open pasture,” as a 2021 report by the Center for the Biological Diversity and Collective Fashion Justice put it. “But wool is not a fiber simply provided by nature — it is a scaled product of modern industrial, chemical, ecological and genetic intervention that’s a significant contributor to the climate crisis, land degradation, water use, pollution and biodiversity loss”…
Wary of climate regulation, wool producers are embracing the same greenwashing diversions as the meat industry — they are, after all, the same industry. Misleading “regenerative wool” claims — a phrase that “lacks any standard definitions or accountability,” as a 2023 report by the Center for Biodiversity and Collective Fashion Justice put it — have proliferated at progressive-coded fashion brands like Allbirds, Everlane, and Reformation. SOURCE…
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