acti-veg:

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.

First of all, vegans are fully aware that shearing is necessary and that it can be done calmly, as it is in animal sanctuaries when it isn’t being done for profit. “Not the case overall” is a gross oversimplification of what is a fairly widespread problem with most of the bigger producers. 

While sheep need to be sheared, sheep raised specifically for their wool are often treated as little more than wool producing machines. Shortly after birth, , sheep are castrated and have their tails cut off, often without anaesthetic. Shearers are usually paid per sheep rather than per hour, which encourages fast processing speeds. Shearing injuries are common, and range from scratches to deep wounds. Shearing is extremely stressful for sheep, as is their handling during mustering, yarding, and penning. Sheep are often sheared too close or when it is too cold in order to maximise profits, meaning that many die from exposure or hypothermia. In Australia for example, nearly a million sheep die each year during the first 30 days after shearing. 

Once their wool production slows, sheep are almost always sent to slaughter, as are many of their lambs, most of whom are slaughtered between 2 and 14 months old. This is not some “unprofessional” one off operation either, this is industry standard. You would be hard pressed to find a commercial wool operation which doesn’t send their sheep to slaughter and doesn’t sell their lambs for meat, and both of those things involve suffering by any reasonable definition of the word. It is not only shearing where the cruelty takes place, and these people aren’t “imbeciles,” they’re large scale producers who recognise that the faster sheep can be sheared, bred and rotated out when their wool quality fails, the more profit can be made out of them.

As for environmental concerns, of course plastic yarn is not good for the environment, I seriously doubt that this is news to anyone reading this. But why is it in every single one of these posts (and this is the third I’ve been tagged in this week) do you guys always want to compare the most environmentally friendly animal fabric with the least environmentally friendly vegan one? Why not bamboo fiber, cork, pinnate, organic cotton, recycled materials? Why not second hand? Avoiding plastic is a totally reasonable argument, but the logical conclusion to that isn’t that you should buy wool, since, as much as people like to pretend otherwise, there are plenty of other options which don’t involve exploiting animals or harming our environment.

lope-and-skelter:

historycultureeducation:

Zofia Posmysz’s mugshot after being arrested for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. She was sent to Auschwitz but survived 2 concentration camps and today is 94 .

Here she is currently. Don’t let her name or her face be forgotten.

(via appropriately-inappropriate)

violentwavesofemotion:

Sappho, tr. by Anne Carson, from “If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho,” (x)

(via sangredesirena)

(via kiefbowl)

theblacknurse:

Fairy Tales and Myth. The Goddess. by James Walker

(via kiefbowl)

nixhouseofcards:

Sometimes I feel like this is what it’s like being on Tumblr

(via kiefbowl)

yofukit:

museum-of-artifacts:

A wheeled asphalt and limestone hedgehog statuette, Iran (3500 years old)

(via kiefbowl)

bogleech:

bogleech:

bogleech:

Hey folks do you like this rubber kid’s toy from the 50′s

I found other versions

I don’t know which one is the best one

Some people genuinely want to know more so actually there IS a real story here; children in the 50′s and 60′s went through a massive hardcore horror phase, eating up toys and comics themed around torture and execution and demonic necromancy like you wouldn’t even believe, and one of the most basic accessible toys during that period were what collectors now simply call “rubber jigglers:”

Obviously there were lots of wholesome, silly jigglers but a lot of companies took advantage of how gross and fleshy the material felt and competed to make the most offensive, disgusting things they could get away with.

A lot of kids would have saved up some nickels, walked down to the Mom n’ Pop corner store and bought rubber bondage corpses to play with even if they had to hide them from their parents and teachers.

Today a lot of the toys in this post will go for up to $100 or more.

(via kiefbowl)