https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/sep/24/forget-fur-stop-wearing-wool-peta-ingrid-newkirk-interview
Last winter, Alicia Silverstone stripped off for an update of Peta’s seminal “I’d rather go naked …” advert, but this time the slogan was: “I’d rather go naked than wear wool.”
Wool? Well, they’re never going to win that one.
“Oh, we will!” Newkirk exclaims. “Young people, they’re right on top of it. They understand it. And sheep are so gentle, they’re so dear!” Last year, secret footage that Peta had gathered from sheep-shearing huts in Victoria, Australia, helped to bring about the first convictions of sheep shearers in Australia for cruelty.
“People would always say: ‘It’s just shearing. It’s a haircut …’ The shearers, a lot of them are on amphetamines because they have to work at speed. Men punching these sheep. They smash them on their backs, they punch them on their face. With their fists, with the metal clippers, they sew them up without [painkiller].
“Showed Joaquin [Phoenix] this video,” she says – she has a habit of eliding the pronoun, so it’s not clear if she or a Peta colleague did the showing, but maybe the two amount to the same. Phoenix is a vegan who nonetheless wore wool suits. After he saw the video, “Joaquin did a television ad for us and a print ad for us, wearing his new vegan suit, and saying: ‘I didn’t know.’” The suit was made from so-called “future wool”. Humans are allowed to make mistakes, as long as they repent.
see
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-03-31/sheep-shearers-sentenced-animal-cruelty-horsham/8404874
Sheep shearers fined up to $3,000 and disqualified from handling sheep after animal cruelty case in Horsham
Four shearers have been fined and disqualified from handling sheep after pleading guilty to animal cruelty charges.
The men appeared in the Horsham Magistrates Court in Victoria on Friday after pleading guilty in February to a combined 60 animal cruelty charges.
