Challenges in Ethical Knitting; Or, How to Do No Harm?
“Knitting may not solve many ills, but it creates few of them.”
—King Rupert to his son, Prince Andre, A Baroque Fable by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
With all due respect to His Majesty, don’t you believe it.
I am returning to knitting after a twenty-year hiatus. In my previous incarnation as a knitter, I specialized in Icelandic wool sweaters. Most of the people I went to college with have one.
Since then I have learned about the horrors in sheep farming. To be honest, I should have known. The animals that are combed for fiber (cashmere goats and musk oxen) are safer than the ones that are sheared, but viewing a being as a production unit, whether human or nonhuman, makes for an abusive relationship. At least humans can do things to defend themselves, like organize. After hearing about the abuses, I remembered seeing a shearing demonstration when I was a child, after which I had protested to my father that the sheep had cuts all over her. He tried to convince me that the sheep wasn’t suffering, but that’s one of the advantages of autism: the parental tie does not bind so tightly that one believes flagrant nonsense like “Yes, it’s bleeding, but they don’t feel pain like we do.” So why was she crying so loudly every time more blood appeared? Animal fibers are out.
Not a problem, I thought. There are plant fibers out there: cotton, hemp, linen. I can try some of those.
I went over the internet, not to buy yarn but to find types of yarn to buy. I try to buy local when I can, and there’s a yarn shop only a couple blocks from me. Even just combing the internet, though, made me worried. Cotton yarn seems to all come from Brazil. This means that instead of contributing to the abuse of domestic nonhumans I am contributing to the destruction of the rainforest and the abuse of wild nonhumans. Yee gads, what a choice.
I had one knitter suggest acrylic yarn. I did a little research. To quote the Wikipedia article, “Production of acrylic fibers is centered in the Far East, declining in Europe and now shut down (except for precursor) in the U.S.” Centered in the Far East? Can we say “slave labor”? I thought we could. I may like nonhumans better than humans, but that doesn’t mean I’m for abusing humans, especially not economically and politically disadvantaged ones by economically and politically spoiled ones.
I went to the local yarn store, to see what was in stock. The only nonanimal fiber was Brazilian cotton.
This time I did buy local but exploited the rainforest. I’m not giving up, though. The advantage to doing socks is that they take small amounts of yarn, and I can try some of the hemp and linen and so on available on the internet, and when I find something I like, order a color card and go to the local store and ask them to buy it for me as a special order rather than going to the internet stores.
I should mention that there is one animal fiber I am willing to use: Sunny fluff. Dog hair is called “chiengora,” and I am collecting Sunny fluff when I brush him or get him trimmed so that someday I can find a spinner to spin it for me and I can make something from it to always remember my pretty golden boy by. I know past doubt that he is not viewed simply as a fiber production unit, and is not abused, even if he doesn’t get as many WALKIES!!! as he would like. (He did get some today, so all you Sunny fans need not worry that he is losing out to the knitting craze!) I can’t be sure how other nonhumans are treated by their caretakers, however, and as I said, having the nonhumans specifically for the purpose of selling their hair is ethically problematical inherently. So Sunny is it, but only because the hair comes off him anyway while he’s here for more important reasons: the ever elusive UCKY-WET DOGGIE KISSES!