Amber Eyes

The amber eyes of this pretty ewe enthralled me.

♥ Read the story behind this moment in my gallery.

Face your Choice | Carmen Mandel

"Face your Choice" collage | Text, images and artwork © Carmen Mandel-Cesáreo

Calf . Snow Leopard . Deer . Crocodile . Horse . Turkey . Jaguar . Otter . Sheep . Geese . Swine . Dove.

Click image to open in my gallery

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Face your Choice - For a humane and balanced lifestyle
~by Carmen Mandel

“Look at the face of these creatures. Face your choice. Opt for food, garments and products that do not carry suffering, abuse and death.

“While acceptable alternatives exist from non-animal source, these creatures and many others, are being systematically and brutally slaughtered”.

“Voiceless victims of varied industries such as food, garment, personal care, art and crafts materials, pharmaceutical, household products, fashion, furniture, automotive and décor, in order to live they rely on your humane choice.”

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♥ I donate 100% sales proceeds from sales of Face your Choice (print or t-shirt) to: Vegan Action - Dedicated to helping animals, the environment and human health by educating the public about the benefits of a vegan lifestyle.

Ethical Yarns And Textiles

Traditional crafting materials like wool, jute (coconut fiber), silk, linen and cotton are popular for their versatility and hard wearing qualities. However, those that are animal-based, as wool and silk, raise ethical questions.

Animals raised for wool production suffer many of the same indignities as those raised for meat — they are selectively bred to have unnatural and often distressing physical characteristics such as very thick wool, which can make their lives unpleasant. Sheep can suffer wool blindness or heat exhaustion because of excessive wool growth.

source www.onegr eenplanet.org

Shearing produces great stress in the animals as they struggle against the rough handling. The use of sharp shears brings the risk of cutting the flesh of the animal. Shearers are usually paid by volume, not by the hour, which encourages fast work with less regard for the welfare of the sheep.

The CSIRO in Australia has developed a non-mechanical method of shearing sheep using an injected protein that creates a natural break in the wool fibres. After fitting a retaining net to enclose the wool, sheep are injected with the protein. When the net is removed after a week, the fleece has separated and is removed by hand.

Animals are also ear tagged, prodded electrically and eventually sold to slaughterhouses when their wool production declines.

Sheep are often ‘mulesed‘, a cruel process involving slicing a large piece of flesh from the behinds of animals without using anesthesia to prevent flystrike.

Silk, on the other hand, is produced by the cocoons of the metamorphosing Silk Worm. In order to remove the silk from the cocoons, the worms are steamed to death, never achieving their life-cycle potential.