Now let’s take a closer look at wool.
Sheep are gentle creatures which, if they were left alone and not genetically manipulated, would grow just enough wool to protect themselves from the elements. Sadly, because we’ve created a market for their fleece and skins, sheep are treated as a commodity.
While we like to think that shearing sheep is basically just “giving them a haircut” and wool is often marketed as “eco-friendly”, the reality of the wool industry is vastly different from our expectations.
The world’s sheep population reached 1.2 billion in 2012, which means that sheep are contributing 25% of the global total for mammals. Australia, the highest wool-producing country in the world with a $3 billion wool industry, is 71 million sheep and lambs, more than twice the number of cows and pigs combined and threefold the number of human Australians.4
These sheep are a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, desertification and water scarcity.5
This also means that the global demand for wool has helped creating the dry, hot conditions that accelerated the catastrophic Australian fires in 2019. Tens of thousands of sheep have been burned to death, often fenced-in and unable to escape.6
When we compare wool to other fibers, both natural and synthetic, inclusion of enteric methane gas emissions means that wool will consistently have the highest GWP (global warming potential) impact.7
Shearers are usually not paid by the hour but by volume, which encourages fast work and leads to frequent injuries. A PETA investigation of more than 30 shearing sheds in the U.S. and Australia uncovered rampant abuse, with shearers caught on tape punching, kicking, and stomping on sheep.8
Due to higher temperatures in Australia and New Zealand, lambs are forced to endure a procedure called “mulesing”, which essentially means that huge chunks of skin are cut off around the anus and vagina, often without painkillers.8
When we visited several sheep farms in Patagonia in 2017 and asked the workers how male sheep are castrated, they confirmed the “rubber ring method”: A tight rubber band put around the testicles to cut off blood supply, one of the most painful methods of castration possible.
Within weeks of birth, lambs’ ears are hole-punched, their tails are chopped off, and males are castrated without painkillers.8
A lot of Australian sheep are shipped to the Middle East on crowded multilevel ships in horrible conditions once they are “spent”, meaning the quality of their wool goes down.9