About Wool.

I am not a Vegan.  I drink milk and consume the products of the Cow.  I eat honey and wear woollen clothes.  I like to think that only contented cows give milk, ensuring that my cows’ lives are not unduly unpleasant on my account.  I like to remember that they would not be alive at all if it were not for my milk consumption, and surely any life is better than no life.  If all the World became Vegan, then our Domesticated Cattle species would be reduced to a few examples in zoos and eventually become totally extinct – after millennia of a symbiotic, ecological relationship.

However, there are ways of the world that I wish were different, and wool is one.  My personal experiences ‘in the bush’ have been minimal and long, long ago, but I did go out one day in the rain and help ‘mark’ the lambs, as I recall the name for putting a tight rubber band on all their tails and round all the baby rams’ balls, so they would all fall off and avoid ‘dags and create weathers.  At least they were not using the traditional method of two bricks.  On another occasion, I saw a paddock full of rams and I understand why farms do what they do and why most people are better off remaining ignorant, unlike myself with my single day’s experience.

One hopes that even lambs being led to be slaughtered have at least had a few happy moments experiencing maternal love of the sort that was a popular topic for artists through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.  Surely those few moments of transcendent bliss are sufficient to make their short lives worthwhile.  As a species, we like to imagine ourselves outside the Natural Order, but it is the nature inherent in each living being that comes into life to ultimately be food for some other, larger creature: Nature is constantly consuming itself.  Only our species, at the pinnacle of the food-chain die uneaten, only to eventually be consumed by worms or bacteria.

While I feel that being Vegetarian is right for me, I cannot bring myself to become a Vegan, because the products of the animals are different from the animals themselves.  However, I recognise that the industries that make these products available, derived from ancient cottage-industries, have a negative side that is best kept out of sight.  Instead of campaigning for the world to become Vegan, activists would have more chance of meaningful results by campaigning for better rights for the animals that give their products instead of ignoring them in the wider claim to end all animal farming.