Wednesday, January 16, 2019



Is wearing wool sweaters unethical now? I can’t keep up...

Quintin McEwen spotted the tag on a Lucky Brand men’s polyester sweater and decided he had had enough. “Shearless Fleece,” it read next to a picture of a sheep heavy with wool. “Not a single sheep was sheared in the making of this garment.”

The sixth-generation sheep farmer in Monkton, Ontario, logged on to his farm’s Facebook page to lash out at Lucky. Not only is shearing not inhumane, he wrote, it helps sheep fend off disease and move around more comfortably. “I am absolutely shocked by your blatant disregard for my industry,” Mr. McEwen wrote in the post, eliciting more than 1,000 comments.

News of the perceived offense spread quickly through a growing and increasingly snippy group of knitters, wool enthusiasts and sheep farmers who say wool criticism is social activism gone awry. Wool proponents say they have been unfairly lumped in with crocodile hunters and mink farmers by overzealous do-gooders who fundamentally misunderstand what goes into sheep farming, not to mention the superior properties of wool.

To the dismay of wool proponents who tout their ecofriendly credentials, they have landed on the wrong side of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The animalrights group recently erected billboards in Boston and New York’s Times Square that display a nude picture of actress Alicia Silverstone with the phrase “Leave Wool Behind” across her backside.

Lucky Brand stopped using the antiwool tag after speaking with some critics, said Chief Executive Carlos Alberini. “It was never our intention to offend anyone with this hangtag,” he said.

After clothing retailer Duluth Trading Co. recently advertised a fleece-lined shirt with the tagline, “No smelly animal fur here, just soft, furnace- warm 200-gram polyester fleece,” retribution was swift.

“I beg of you, please stop throwing wool under the bus,” Ms. Parkes wrote in an Instagram post. “You know as well as I do that commercial wool has no scent at all, and that it comes from a living animal who goes on living a very good life,” said the 49-year-old who lives in Portland, Maine.

The company has taken antiwool statements out of future catalogs after hearing concerns, said a spokeswoman. “We have a deep appreciation of the wool industry,” she said.

SOURCE

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

the idea of the activists is actually to make a total disconnect with the real environment and try to get people to "protect" a fairytale dream one where everything is perfect so long as humans don't interfere. it doesn't matter to them that most cultivated animals are so changed by selective breeding that they could not survive,let alone thrive, in the wild, just turn them all loose. it doesn't matter to them that even if we cultivated every square inch of open ground we still couldn't feed the world on a vegan or vegetarian diet, because they feel the world is overpopulated and sacrificies must be made. let's start with peta.

Bird of Paradise said...

The idea that the earth is Fragile and that nature is delicaly balanced is is one of the biggist loads of malarkey ever the Eco-Wackos are losing their minds from reading seeing and hearing all this Climate Change/Global Warming load of poppycock the Eco-Nuts who lay awake at night listening to the trees scmreaming when their chopped down and all those years of the SAVE THE RAIN FORESTS load of balderdash

Anonymous said...

Polyester is made from what? Hydrocarbon. To Me wool is a sustainable source.

Stan B said...

Ah yes - PETA in bed with BIG OIL again. Faux Fur, Polyester, all of it sourced from that icky black stuff that kills sea birds by the billions.

Anyone who's ever been around modern sheep knows that FAILURE TO SHEER is a life threatening abuse of the animals, as pointed out in this story.