The fact that you don’t understand or agree with a particular perspective does not make the person who holds it stupid; that is the height of arrogance. I don’t agree with people who publicly shill for a multi-billion dollar industry for free, but I don’t assume that they’re stupid for doing it. Wool is generally opposed on two grounds, neither of which are unreasonable:
In my experience, people who hold the view that anyone who doesn’t agree that wool is ethical must be stupid generally believe that wool production is as innocuous as a haircut, but this is just a testament to how effective the wool industry has been at cultivating a benign public image. Sheep do need to be sheared, because we purposely breed them to overproduce wool. This is done for the same reason we breed pigs who are too large, turkeys who are too fat to even stand up, chickens who produce far more eggs than is healthy, and cows with udders so huge that they are prone to infection.
These animals are selectively bred, man-made creatures who can barely even be called the same animal as their wild counterparts. Intentionally breeding sheep to produce too much wool to make a profit, then using the fact that they now need human intervention to be comfortable in order to continue to profit from this arrangement, is a self-serving and circular argument.
While obtaining wool does not technically require the deaths of the animals who are farmed for it, this does not mean that sheep do not die as a direct result of the wool industry, or that the production or purchasing of wool is without harm. Sheep raised specifically for their wool are often treated as little more than wool-producing machines.
Shortly after birth, lambs are castrated if they are male and have their tails cut off, often without anesthetic. Shearers are often paid per sheep rather than per hour, which encourages fast processing speeds. It is perhaps unsurprising then, that injuries are fairly common; they can range from small scratches to deep, painful wounds. Sheep are often sheared too close or when it is too cold – this is done to maximise profit, but it means that many sheep die from exposure or hypothermia. Once their wool production declines in quality, sheep are almost always sent to slaughter. This is also true of many of their lambs, who can be killed as young as two months old during lambing season, and almost all lamb on supermarket shelves will be from animals who weren’t allowed to live for a single year.
This may just be my limited intelligence talking, but even to my very simple mind it would seem that the wool industry and the meat industry are inextricably linked. How can it be that you can completely understand objecting to killing an animal for meat, but you can’t understand objecting to exploiting an animal for their fleece, then killing them and their babies for meat?
From an animal rights perspective, even aside from welfare issues, abolitionists object to wool because we believe that it is fundamentally wrong to breed, exploit and kill sentient being for the purposes of profit. We believe that it is wrong for anyone’s labour, body and life to be solely devoted to serving someone else’s interests rather than their own. We believe that, to the extent that we are able to give it to them, non-human animals deserve life, liberty and bodily autonomy. Is that really so stupid?
As ruminants, sheep produce a lot of methane. Methane is the primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas, exposure to which causes 1 million premature deaths every year. Over 20 years, it is 80 times more potent at warming the planet than carbon dioxide.
Unlike animals raised for meat, the average lifespan of a sheep farmed for wool is 10-12 years, over this entire time they are grazing and producing large quantities of methane. According to one analysis of wool production in Australia, 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. The below chart shows one study’s estimate of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions in kilograms per 264 grams of fiber for seven different fabrics:
Emissions are not the only environmental impact of wool production, either. The environmental activist and journalist George Monbiot calls sheep ‘the white plague‘, and with good reason. Through overgrazing, sheep reduce the biological diversity of the sites they frequent. Where land has been deforested to accommodate them, they ensure that trees cannot re-populate these desolate areas by eating any green shoots that make their way above the compacted soil. The fact that farmers often trap, kill, or poison any predators who might harm their livestock does not help.
The industry is well aware of this impact, and while there are efforts to reduce the impact of sheep through selective breeding and better management, the industry has embraced the same greenwashing techniques as big oil. The greenwashing of wool is particularly pronounced, which is largely why we all have that pastoral fantasy image of what it means to farm sheep. As the 2021 report by the Center for the Biological Diversity and Collective Fashion Justice put it:
“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.”
This is made all the worse by the fact that wool is very easily replaced by more sustainable alternatives. The most common alternative is one of the best – organic cotton. Conventionally grown cotton often involves pesticide use and far higher water use, whereas organic cotton reduces these problems considerably. Recycled cotton is even better, though tends to be more expensive. It is worth noting that the climate impact of cotton can vary greatly depending on how and where it is grown, but this is also true of sheep’s wool.
Even accounting for these variations, sheep’s wool is wildly unsustainable and extremely resource-intensive, by just about any metric that makes sense.
If your immediate response to learning this is to point out that cotton can’t keep you warm in cold weather (this is the standard rebuttal), then you may be surprised to learn that thick-weave cotton is very warm, including knits, flannel, and fleece. These are the same forms that you’d buy wool in for its warmth. Wool is still going to be warmer (and so is polyester), but for all but the most extreme cold, organic cotton will serve you well if you layer sensibly.
Cotton is not the only alternative, though. Hemp is extremely sustainable, it is very robust, doesn’t require pesticides, is cheap to produce with little land, and can be weaved into fleece just as wool can. It is also much more sustainable than even organic cotton. Hemp is also an excellent insulator, and it helps that it is antibacterial and antimicrobial.
There are also synthetic, non-plastic alternatives to consider, like rayon and bamboo, which while a natural material is usually subject to cellulose treatment, chemical processing, and mechanical procedures to form the fibers. These are particularly good for dealing with moisture while retaining heat.
Many people want a completely plastic free wardrobe (though wool is often blended with it), but for those who don’t then recycled plastic can also form part of a sustainable, animal-free wardrobe, and is a good way for manufacturers to use plastic that would otherwise end up in landfill. You can also buy second hand, which will always be more sustainable than anything you buy new.
You can disagree with this line of reasoning, most people do. Yours is the opinion of the overwhelming majority, it has millions of dollars of advertising and corporate lobbying reinforcing it and I’ve seen a post worded almost exactly like yours literally hundreds or times. But the fact that we have arrived at different conclusions doesn’t mean that one of us must be stupid.
You can believe that animals don’t deserve any rights, that it is fine to exploit sentient beings to serve capitalist interests, and for landowners to ruin vast tracts of often formerly forested land for grazing and polluting our air with methane to produce a material that few people actually need. But to assume that anyone who has an earnest moral objection to the wool industry must just be lacking in intelligence is incredibly narrow minded, cynical, and mean-spirited.
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