3 posts tagged “cruelty”
Some of you have see me wearing a hoodie with the message "Club Sandwiches Not Seals".
Many people believe that the clubbing of seals is a thing of the past, but the harsh reality is that the commercial seal hunt goes on. Last year alone, more than 350,000 pups were shot or clubbed to death on the ice. Starting March 29, the Canadian government will allow hundreds of thousands more to die.
The baby seals are hunted at an age when they have little ability to move around much, when their mothers have just begun to return to the sea to find food and the babies are left on the ice alone. They have no method of escape or protection. These animals are far from killed humanely; they're bludgeoned with hooked clubs and then skinned. The Canadian board of veterinarians that oversaw the hunt recently acknowledged that many were skinned while still alive.
Here's a video of last year's slaughter, from the Humane Society. Warning: these images are fairly graphic.
Decades of public outcry led to the 1987 ban of hunting whitecoats, which are newborn harp seals. But it only takes about 12 days for the seals' fur to develop grey patches, at which point they become fair game to hunters. Ninety-five percent of the harp seals killed are less than three months old.
The Canadian government claims that the seals are hunted because they are eating all the fish, when the truth is the seals are hunted for a frivolous demand of their pelts. Seal populations have dropped by almost half a million over the last several years and top scientists warn that if a commercial hunt of this scale continues the species could be in jeopardy in the very near future.
The profits from the seal hunt feed the fashion industry, but contribute to very little of the hunters' overall income. The "hunt" lasts for several weeks, and the hunters' main source of income is fishing. You can further help end the hunt by boycotting Canadian seafood, as I've done. Ask your server where their seafood selection come from. Most supermarket seafood is labeled with the country of origin.
Canada's annual commercial seal hunt is the largest slaughter of marine mammals on the planet. If these seals only lived a short distance to the south, they would be protected by U.S. law. Our Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibits the killing of all marine mammals - including seals. It's time Canada recognized the spirit of this act and adopted its own similar policy.
As an active member of the Humane Society and Oceana, I've taken action to stop the Canadian seal hunt. Will you do the same?
Don't let these seal cubs be killed in the name of fashion, please contact Canadian Prime Minister Harper and your local Representatives and demand an end to this cruel hunt.
What's the meanest thing you've ever done to someone?
Broke up with my high school boyfriend three years in a row on his birthday. I know, I know - you're wondering how that's even possible. Well, I used to have this 'spring-cleaning' mentality about my life when I was a kid and would have this desperate urge to fix my life drastically in the new year. So every January, I would end up weighing all the problems in my life, including our sweet, but juvenile relationship and would end up breaking up with him. His birthday just happened to be in January, but as luck would have it, I did end up breaking up with him within days of it every time. I think I knew it was coming up, and maybe I just felt it was nicer to get it out of the way before the event.
The breaking-up part wasn't the worst, though. ("'Cause breakin' up is hard to do....") I think the worst was staying with him after the first year. You see, within months of hooking up in high school, I took off for summer vacation and he slept with my best friend while I was gone. I claimed to forgive him when I came back and found out, but years later I realized that I never actually had - that I'd been holding it over him instead. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't quite a saint, and each year managed to give me plenty of material to break up with him over: drugs, lying about drugs, getting friends to lie to me about drugs, etc. But when it was all said and done and then some, I realized that no one deserved the emotional suffering I put him through.
Years after our breakup and never having stayed in contact, I called him up and apologized for having been such a bitch. I was really, really upset and remember crying into the phone, realizing that he had absolutely no reason to forgive me, but he did. Forgiveness is truly an amazing gift, in both the strength it takes to grant and the utter peace it gives when bestowed.
Conventional sheep, kept in close confinement en masse, are often 'dipped' in highly toxic pesticide solutions to kill ticks, lice, blowfly and scab. (Google: sheep dipping) I can't seem to find much on how much pesticide residue is left over in processed conventional yarns, but the chemicals used in the process can cause central nervous system damage. And sheep are dipped not once in their lifetime, but at least several times, on average.*
FWIW, I can't say that I'll never buy conventional yarns again. There's too much variety missing from the organic market right now. But I will promise to buy organic where possible and affordable, and save my yarn money to buy more organic, rather than splurging on cheap conventionals. I'm also contacting all of my favorite yarn manufacturers (ie. Brown Sheep, Blue Sky, etc.) to find out where they get their wool/fibers from, and asking for specific farms and locations. At the very least, maybe it'll bring to their attention that people care about this stuff. 
- O-Wool, by the Vermont Organic Fiber Company. Free shipping @ theyarngrove.com
- Near Sea Naturals carries a large variety of organic fibers, such as nettle, cotton, alpaca, wool, recycled silk, and hemp.
- Marr Haven sells their own, fresh-from-the-farm 100% chemical-free wool yarn, with minimum processing to keep most of the natural lanolin intact. (Lanolin naturally softens wool fibers with washing, and is almost completely missing from conventionally processed yarns.)
- There's a new shop opening later this fall, Organic Imaginings, which plans to feature organic yarns, including certified organic and fair trade yarns. Drop them an email and show them some love!
- Browse Etsy for homemade yarns straight from the sheep. Some of my favorite sellers that spin yarn from their own sheep are ritaswoolybatts. (The sellers I steer clear of are anyone associated with the Makah tribe, which cruelly hunts grey whales for non-nutritive purposes.)
In an effort to compile a master list of organic yarns, I've started to scour the web and save promising links to del.icio.us. If you're interested in my findings, you can find them and similar bookmarks from others with the keywords "eco organic yarn".
* If you're interested in more information about the real cost of wool, I don't recommend PETA's savethesheep.com site. I say this because while their sheep campaign targets Australian farms, it demonizes all wool growers with blanket statements like "sheep raised for their wool all over the world are castrated and have their tails cut off...". What about the few small production farmers that DO practice humane and ethical treatment of sheep? Or those that keep sheep or alpacas as pets and create homespun yarns? Add to this that PETA actually recommends the use of synthetics like tencel (according to the Green Guide, "the EPA rated Courtauld [the manufacturer of rayon] the sixth-largest producer of inorganic pollution in the U.S.") and rayon (Co-op America states that "about a third of the pulp obtained from a tree will end up in finished rayon thread"; the rest is thrown away).
