grison-in-space: beatrice-otter:alexseanchai:ruffboijuliaburnsides: taibhsearachd:ruusverd:godesssir
grison-in-space: beatrice-otter:alexseanchai:ruffboijuliaburnsides: taibhsearachd:ruusverd:godesssiri:darkvioletcloud: sabelmouse: This fake yarn is supposedly better for sheep. Aimed at people who don’t know where wool comes from, it’s 100% plastic. Yes, plastic. So any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose. You’re supposed to believe that sheep shearing is violent and cruel. There are imbeciles out there that work in an unprofessional manner while shearing, but that’s not the case overall. Sheep don’t suffer from having their fleece removed. Left on, the fleece can become a home for fly eggs and the subsequent maggots which can eat the sheep. Chemical treatments are available to prevent that happening. It’s much better for the sheep, the land and the farmer to avoid chemical use. Don’t be fooled. Wool is a sustainable material, one we should make more and better use of. Any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose. This is very important. And you need to wash acrylic wool garment more often than natural wool. They get stinky way more easily. In my almost-decade of owning sheep, there have been exactly two(2) bad shearers try to start up in the area. Know what happened? The first farm they went to called every other shepherd in the area and said “This guy cut one of my sheep and didn’t think it was a big deal, don’t hire him.” And neither of them ever did business in the area again. Some farmers are less conscientious than they should be about taking care of their stock, and the occasional tiny nick will happen, but no one is going to hire a shearer who is a) incompetent enough and b) uncaring enough to actually injure the animals to the point of bleeding, let alone the kind of horrors the internet claims.Also, most breeds of sheep will literally die if they go too long without being sheared. PETA (and let’s face it, most of this anti-wool stuff can be traced back to deliberate misinformation from PETA) doesn’t care if sheep die, they have openly stated that they would prefer every domestic species that can no longer survive without humans go extinct rather than live in “"slavery.”“ Humans and sheep have lived together for over ten thousand years, they’ve been domesticated longer than dogs! Their lives consist of doing whatever the heck they want (for the most part they only want to walk, eat, sleep, play, and make lambs) while being fed and cared for, for the low price of having their hair cut once a year. Why would anyone boycott this natural, biodegradable fiber humans have been using for so long to the benefit of both species, in favor of plastics that are killing the planet?? …sheep absolutely have not been domesticated longer than dogs, but that’s beside the point, just an anthropological quibble. I fully agree with everything else in this post. (we potentially domesticated wolves as far back as 33kya! but yes, goats and sheep were probably not too long after that, evolutionarily speaking. And the rest of this post is spot on!) [image: several skeins of Happy Sheep 100% acrylic yarn. the label assures us “No sheep were sheared to make this yarn, so rest assured they’re all warm and snuggly in their own wooly jumpers tonight.”].I hate to think of sheep who grew a nice full coat over the winter having to still wear it in the summer. I really do. poor overheated sheep. In the Hebrew Bible, the same word means both “sheep” and “goats.” There is no distinction made between the two animals. Why? Because they were originally the same animal. Goats are what you get when you breed for hardiness and meat and milk. They’re the base animal, much closer to the original wild animal, and in fact there are still wild goats out there that have never been domesticated.Sheep are what you get when you say “the ONLY thing that matters is wool, we don’t care if they get dumb as fuck and fragile and don’t produce much meat or milk, all we care about is that they produce a fuckton of quality wool.” If you take goats and breed for wool, eventually you will end up with sheep.Sheep do not exist in nature. There have never been wild sheep. The animal was created by humans for its wool. That’s it’s purpose in life. It cannot survive in the wild alone without human care and shearing. …. Actually, no. Sheep and goats are different species. They are hard to tell apart from skeletons, but that’s not what we rely on to define species. We rely on gene flow: can we cross the two things together? If we mate a Chihuahua and a Great Dane, can we get puppies that can breed with either parent type? Yes, so: dogs of various types, even when they are clearly very skeletally different, are still all dogs. By contrast, the documented list of sheep/goat hybrids is about six listed cases, even though both types of animals are frequently pastured together in breeding herds. Because sheep and goats have very different numbers of chromosomes, and because sheep and goats are normally unwilling to breed with one another, they make quite good biological species. They even originate from two different wild species! Sheep are domestic mouflon:And truly wild goats are also referred to as ibex: As a note, even among wild animals, sheep and goats aren’t each other’s closest living relatives at all. Markhor, two species of tur, and five other species of ibex are all closer relatives of goats than any sheep are; all nine or ten species share a genus, Capra. Domestic sheep share their genus, Ovis, with Dall sheep, bighorn sheep, snow sheep and urial. Additionally, both sheep and goats are bred for all kinds of purposes! There are hair sheep that are bred for meat and specifically selected to not need shearing at all, because the wool isn’t considered worth the labor of the shearing. Here’s one of them, Dorper sheep.Because hair sheep simply shed dead hair instead of growing it indefinitely, they tend to handle high heat conditions better than wool sheep. That’s another reason that the hair trait was deliberately developed in Dorpers, which are bred for their meat. Meat isn’t the only product sheep are bred for, though! In much of the world, sheep fat is really important in cooking, which has led to the breeding of sheep bred to maximize not the size of the carcass, but the amount of fat you can get out of the tail end of the sheep (where the best cooking fat comes from). Here’s a broad tailed fat tail variety:And these are Damara fat tail sheep, which are a long-tail fat tailed breed. Their tails can get really enormous. (Note that all three of these happen to be hair breeds; quite apart from everything else, shearing one of these hindquarters is a job l personally would not want!)But sheep even go beyond wool, meat, and fat: here’s a breed, the East Friesan, selected for milk production! On the other hand, sheep actually aren’t the only ones selected for fiber! Mohair comes from angora goats, not sheep. Look, wild goats still exist! But so do wild sheep. -- source link
#long post