I've owned a flock of about 40 wool sheep, nowhere near as many as a true extensive farming operation, but enough that I have some first hand experience with sheep.
I would say sheep are not particularly distressed by humans or by shearing. They prefer to be in open areas, and prefer to be with other sheep, but I never felt like they were actually suffering during handling or shearing. Our sheep might have been more used to humans than a large commercial flock though.
Also, not all sheep breeds require docking. And for those that do, I'm not convinced it is "extremely" painful. The lambs we docked/castrated were back to happily bouncing around like nothing happened within minutes. It might be possible if the band is applied incorrectly to cause extreme pain, but my impression was that it was much more humane than the castration+branding done to calves. Personally, I feel like wool sheep have pretty excellent lives compared to pretty much any other livestock- happy sheep make good wool and that aligns the incentives between farmer and animal pretty clearly.
One thing that you didn't touch on that is very important in raising wool sheep are parasites. Parasites can take a hold of a flock pretty swiftly if you aren't attentive, and cause anemia leading to death quite easily. That would probably be my Number One sheep wellness check. Frequently rotating flocks through pastures and treating infections with anti parasitics can eliminate the issue, but it can be a constant battle depending on the breed of your flock and quality of pasture.
Always good to hear from real farmers. :) Parasites came up in my reading but in this post I lumped them into diseases in general for simplicity. My understanding is that a small flock will be less frightened by humans because they're more familiar. Also that probably says good things about your handling of the sheep. :) I'm glad that your sheep don't seem to have been bothered but in general I'm going to defer to expert consensus.
I definitely think if it is something that is pricking at your conscience, and you have time/money to devote to it, there is a market out there for fiber from specific breeds of sheep that don't typically get docked, like icelandic, friesan, romanav etc, not necessarily for the animal welfare benefits but for the unique properties of the wool.
Do you compare these numbers with cotton, polyester, etc?
The environmental devastation and labor abuse involved in most cotton production upset me a lot, especially given pretty much every other fiber gives me sensory problems. More ethical cotton exists but it's hard to be sure from countries away how ethical it is, and you can't produce cotton in the quantities we currently use in an ethical way.
Meanwhile polyester is associated with more labor abuse (exposure to toxic chemicals, like people in my town still have a higher rate of cancers and birth defects 30 years after the fiber plant shut down!), microplastics, and so on. As well as feeling like I'm wearing plastic bags.
I've concluded hemp and flax are the best fibers, but for many reasons they're not so easy to find.
So I'm back to good old "thrift stores, and wear your clothes to threads" as an ethical solution. Which doesn't help much with the kids' clothes, given how fast they grow out of them and put holes in them!
I'm confused about what standard you are trying to apply here. Up until the last paragraph, I thought you were comparing the lives of wool sheep to some idealized best possible wool sheep life, or at least the best life we humans could practically give wool sheep. And you make a good case that we are not living up to that. But if that is the comparison you are making, it seems like the wrong standard. If we don't buy wool, then nobody farms wool, and wool sheep don't exist. So the correct standard to compare their lives to is not existing at all.
In the last paragraph, you seem to suggest that you are comparing the lives of wool sheep to the counterfactual where they don't exist at all. And if that is what you are trying to do, I have no idea how the fact you present could amount to a net negative live. These sheep have a few weeks of suffering when they loose their balls and tails. It's not obvious to me that their lives are negative value even during those few weeks - most humans with chronic pain still prefer existing to not. But even if their lives are negative value during those few weeks, and during the few hours a few times a year that they interact with humans for the remaining years of their lives, that still leaves most of their lives during which they are living perfectly happy sheep lives! How could that not make their lives net positive?
> Although mulesing also is believed to protect sheep from flystrike, it is in fact unnecessary.
Is that intended to mean like "Although mulesing also is [incorrectly] believed to protect sheep from flystrike, it is in fact unnecessary [because it doesn't work]", or "Although mulesing also is [correctly] believed to protect sheep from flystrike, it is in fact unnecessary [because there are other feasible methods]"?
(I find the first one a more natural reading, but the second one more plausible.)
There are lower - pain methods for both castration and tail docking -- still not pain free but apparently significantly less signs of distress shown by lambs on application and faster healing/recovery (short scrotum castration and plastic clips used instead of rubber ring). Idk to what extent it's possible to trace the use of those.
BUT CMON, wool's benefits are massively longer lasting than anything that gets killed for meat (whether turkey or cow)? A wool coat lasts decades. A jumper, many years. Even wool blend socks last couple of years. You don't need to wash wool anywhere near as often as plastic (or even wood/bamboo derived) fibres and it gets washed in low temps so it lasts even longer.
I wasn't commissioned to write about cashmere goats but the Textile Exchange does have a procedure for approving goats, and I'd expect their standards to be similarly high.
I agree that how much use you'd get out of wool is a very important consideration when deciding whether to buy wool! I sort of gesture at that but in general expect people to decide for themselves.
The UK mandates anaesthesia for castration and docking (though there are anaesthetic shortages). How feasible is it to push for similar laws in other countries?
Some people castrate baby humans and lots of cultures have castrated teenagers as a coming of age practice. If we are willing to do it to ourselves I don't see that it is something we should worry too much about for them.
Lol, apparently not. Guess I was thinking of the other c-word. Of course, plenty of cultures throughout history have performed castration on humans, so the point still basically works.
> The most unpleasant routine experience for sheep is shearing
I should note that this is actually necessary for certain breeds of sheep (Merino, Romney, Suffolk...), and they would get skin infection, restricted movement and heat stress if left untouched.
Anyone got any data on how sheep wool compares to other types of wool (alpaca, goat, yak...), and which one would be the most ethical?
I've owned a flock of about 40 wool sheep, nowhere near as many as a true extensive farming operation, but enough that I have some first hand experience with sheep.
I would say sheep are not particularly distressed by humans or by shearing. They prefer to be in open areas, and prefer to be with other sheep, but I never felt like they were actually suffering during handling or shearing. Our sheep might have been more used to humans than a large commercial flock though.
Also, not all sheep breeds require docking. And for those that do, I'm not convinced it is "extremely" painful. The lambs we docked/castrated were back to happily bouncing around like nothing happened within minutes. It might be possible if the band is applied incorrectly to cause extreme pain, but my impression was that it was much more humane than the castration+branding done to calves. Personally, I feel like wool sheep have pretty excellent lives compared to pretty much any other livestock- happy sheep make good wool and that aligns the incentives between farmer and animal pretty clearly.
One thing that you didn't touch on that is very important in raising wool sheep are parasites. Parasites can take a hold of a flock pretty swiftly if you aren't attentive, and cause anemia leading to death quite easily. That would probably be my Number One sheep wellness check. Frequently rotating flocks through pastures and treating infections with anti parasitics can eliminate the issue, but it can be a constant battle depending on the breed of your flock and quality of pasture.
Always good to hear from real farmers. :) Parasites came up in my reading but in this post I lumped them into diseases in general for simplicity. My understanding is that a small flock will be less frightened by humans because they're more familiar. Also that probably says good things about your handling of the sheep. :) I'm glad that your sheep don't seem to have been bothered but in general I'm going to defer to expert consensus.
Makes sense!
I definitely think if it is something that is pricking at your conscience, and you have time/money to devote to it, there is a market out there for fiber from specific breeds of sheep that don't typically get docked, like icelandic, friesan, romanav etc, not necessarily for the animal welfare benefits but for the unique properties of the wool.
Do you compare these numbers with cotton, polyester, etc?
The environmental devastation and labor abuse involved in most cotton production upset me a lot, especially given pretty much every other fiber gives me sensory problems. More ethical cotton exists but it's hard to be sure from countries away how ethical it is, and you can't produce cotton in the quantities we currently use in an ethical way.
Meanwhile polyester is associated with more labor abuse (exposure to toxic chemicals, like people in my town still have a higher rate of cancers and birth defects 30 years after the fiber plant shut down!), microplastics, and so on. As well as feeling like I'm wearing plastic bags.
I've concluded hemp and flax are the best fibers, but for many reasons they're not so easy to find.
So I'm back to good old "thrift stores, and wear your clothes to threads" as an ethical solution. Which doesn't help much with the kids' clothes, given how fast they grow out of them and put holes in them!
I'm confused about what standard you are trying to apply here. Up until the last paragraph, I thought you were comparing the lives of wool sheep to some idealized best possible wool sheep life, or at least the best life we humans could practically give wool sheep. And you make a good case that we are not living up to that. But if that is the comparison you are making, it seems like the wrong standard. If we don't buy wool, then nobody farms wool, and wool sheep don't exist. So the correct standard to compare their lives to is not existing at all.
In the last paragraph, you seem to suggest that you are comparing the lives of wool sheep to the counterfactual where they don't exist at all. And if that is what you are trying to do, I have no idea how the fact you present could amount to a net negative live. These sheep have a few weeks of suffering when they loose their balls and tails. It's not obvious to me that their lives are negative value even during those few weeks - most humans with chronic pain still prefer existing to not. But even if their lives are negative value during those few weeks, and during the few hours a few times a year that they interact with humans for the remaining years of their lives, that still leaves most of their lives during which they are living perfectly happy sheep lives! How could that not make their lives net positive?
Thanks for writing this!
> Although mulesing also is believed to protect sheep from flystrike, it is in fact unnecessary.
Is that intended to mean like "Although mulesing also is [incorrectly] believed to protect sheep from flystrike, it is in fact unnecessary [because it doesn't work]", or "Although mulesing also is [correctly] believed to protect sheep from flystrike, it is in fact unnecessary [because there are other feasible methods]"?
(I find the first one a more natural reading, but the second one more plausible.)
There are lower - pain methods for both castration and tail docking -- still not pain free but apparently significantly less signs of distress shown by lambs on application and faster healing/recovery (short scrotum castration and plastic clips used instead of rubber ring). Idk to what extent it's possible to trace the use of those.
BUT CMON, wool's benefits are massively longer lasting than anything that gets killed for meat (whether turkey or cow)? A wool coat lasts decades. A jumper, many years. Even wool blend socks last couple of years. You don't need to wash wool anywhere near as often as plastic (or even wood/bamboo derived) fibres and it gets washed in low temps so it lasts even longer.
Do you have any data on cashmere goats?
I wasn't commissioned to write about cashmere goats but the Textile Exchange does have a procedure for approving goats, and I'd expect their standards to be similarly high.
I agree that how much use you'd get out of wool is a very important consideration when deciding whether to buy wool! I sort of gesture at that but in general expect people to decide for themselves.
> One hour of human suffering is equivalent to half an hour of sheep suffering
I think this is backwards
The UK mandates anaesthesia for castration and docking (though there are anaesthetic shortages). How feasible is it to push for similar laws in other countries?
Some people castrate baby humans and lots of cultures have castrated teenagers as a coming of age practice. If we are willing to do it to ourselves I don't see that it is something we should worry too much about for them.
...do you know what the word "castration" means?
Lol, apparently not. Guess I was thinking of the other c-word. Of course, plenty of cultures throughout history have performed castration on humans, so the point still basically works.
> The most unpleasant routine experience for sheep is shearing
I should note that this is actually necessary for certain breeds of sheep (Merino, Romney, Suffolk...), and they would get skin infection, restricted movement and heat stress if left untouched.
Anyone got any data on how sheep wool compares to other types of wool (alpaca, goat, yak...), and which one would be the most ethical?