Do vegans wear wool?

My DGD says one of the reasons she has decided to become a vegetarian is because she loves her pets.

Announcing during the Christmas holiday that if you feel uncomfortable with the idea of eating a dog or a cat then why do you feel happy about eating a cow or a pig?

Thought provoking thread.
Most vegans/vegetarians I know are animal lovers and keep pets although I can see that keeping pets is unnatural and can be seen as exploitative. Humans have co-existed with animals for thousands of years so it seems natural to us. I can't imagine a world without animals in the fields.
Where do vegans stand on the culling of deer, boar etc to prevent them becoming a nuisance (and devastating crops)?

The only true vegan I know has a pet, makes the most delicious cakes without animal products and doesn’t force her views on anyone-even her husband, who is not vegan or even vegetarian, so sometimes he eats her food and sometimes she prepares what he likes (or he prepares their food). I’ve never looked at her shoes though.

ah i see - sounds like he has his work cut out for him, but very good of him to take his daughter's wishes seriously, especiallyy after a hard day! In that case, this web page might help - if you scroll to the bottom, there's a part entitled 'best protein sources for vegetarians' www.nomeatathlete.com/vegetarian-protein/

Thank you for that downdale I have downloaded your link and will read it properly later.

My main concern is the substituting meat for non-meat. Which will be fairly easy for me as i only cook her main meal 2-3 times a week. My son does almost all of the cooking at home (after a hard physical days work) and there are 5 of them to cook for (DDiL is very picky too) so I can't imagine he will find it easy to cook seperate dishes. What I would like is to help him with a kind of substitute list.

There's a field near me where the sheep shed their wool naturally. The birds take it for their nests.
A builder wanted to build a hundred houses in the field, but was denied planning. In the summer the field is like a wild meadow.

Jane, I think there was only one person who asked for a vegetarian pizza. It wasn't the whole party changing their minds.
If she'd just kept her thoughts to herself instead of putting it on facebook,she could have smirked to herself as long as she wanted.

After I took over a guest house and turned it vegetarian, I wrote to all the people who had bookings and explained, and told them I would book them in somewhere else if they wanted their bacon, only one party of four said they'd go somewhere else. The rest said that was fine, and it would be interesting.
We had group of four from America, and one of them gave a bad review on tripadviser.
I was able to give dates for when we had changed, when we told them we had changed, and the fact that they agreed to come even though they knew.
Most of the menu was suitable for vegans, although they could have dairy if they wanted.
The next group from America were from California and had fruit farms. They had nothing but praise, and returned a few years later.

Vegans don't have pets apparently, I'm sure my three rescue cats would be relieved to know that they could have carried on living in the streets. Sadly two of them have now died, but all three have been loved, fed, received veterinary as needed, and actually rather spoiled.

Sorry, I should qualify my last post by saying if your leather shoes were made in the UK, they may be made from UK cow hide.

please don't worry gillybob! Any diet can be good or bad, and a healthy vegetarian diet is perfectly achievable. Here's some information that might help: www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/balanced-diet-vegetarian

So my view is that if animals are farmed and killed humanely we are doing the best we can and still getting incredibly good food (meat), which is good for us, into the bargain.

It is hypocritical to pretend that those thousands/millions of tiny animals aren't as important or as deserving of sympathy as cows or sheep.

Actually, you can't grow any crop without killing thousands of animals. Ploughing to plant crops kills thousands if not millions of tiny animals. One simply cannot eat without killing animals.

Animal manure to fertilise fields?

M0nica you asked
How do vegans ensure that the food they eat has not been produced using animal products?

The simple answer is they cook from scratch. If they buy processed food, they will have done research to find out if they can eat it.

Just as an aside, most shoe leather comes from animals bred for the leather. Your leather shoes are not made from hides of the cows you see in the fields. Shoe leather is not a bi-product of animals produced for beef.

The idea is that if you do not keep sheep for wool, the land the sheep would normally graze on can be used for growing crops to feed more people.

Whoever said this needs to visit the mountainous areas of Britain where sheep are bred for wool and meat. The land they graze is not suitable for growing crops. As @herdyshepherd1 said to someone who asked why he didn't grow carrots instead, "Carrots don't grow here".

The long view is that people have been farming for thousands of years so where crops grow there are generally crops growing and where crops don't grow cattle, sheep or goats are raised. It's only recently that there have been widespread alternatives to meat that are even nearly as power and vitamin packed as meat is. You can't really expect thousands of years of custom to vanish in a generation.

My soon to be 12 DGD has announced that she is now a full vegetarian. She has hardly touched meat for almost a year and is now sure that she will never eat meat again. Am I silly to be concerned? She is tiny for her age, very petite, not an ounce of body fat and I worry that she might become undernourished. For the last year or so she has avoided "meat" (in the traditional sense) but agreed to have say a lasagne (where she could disassociate the meat) or have a sunday lunch just leaving the meat out but enjoying the gravy made from meat stock. Now she is reading labels etc. and I am worried.

Any assurances would be most welcome.

by the way pleather stands for plastic leather so probably worse for the environment than leather in the long term

janeainsworth I heard that when you wash fleeces made from recycled plastic, fibres are washed away and add to the plastic in the ocean, as it's micro sized it gets into the food system. Even if no-one ate fish any more, other animals eat fish etc etc, plastic is the bane of the modern world.

Eglantine to make a work bold, use the * and not the " symbol.

'Wild' sheep do not have to be shorn and would naturally shed its coat when it warmer. The problem with our sheep is that they have been bred for to produce wool all year round to the point where it needs to be sheared. Sheep are prematurely shorn for commercial purposes to avoid the loss of wool. In reality the sheep is left cold after shearing.

Well chipped-in, Downdale I respect your right to your opinion.

I prefer the term plant based diet it stops the awful cruelty of the slaughterhouse and also stops the incessant questioning of veganism which will make it look stupid and wrong. Eg wool leather medicines the end of animals etc etc. the binary thing if all or nothing when in fact the reason is to stop the industrialized cruelty. It is naive to think it is anything else but if you want to convince yourselves how eating meat is good then carry on.

I presume you've seen the news about the restaurant in Shropshire
Yes
Unbelievable that anyone could be so stupid, but on the other hand it must have been irritating to have specially prepared vegan food for a party, only to have them order regular pizza off the standard menu.
I wonder what would have happened if the restaurateur had just pointed out to the customers at the time, that she’d cooked vegan food for them.
How to ruin your business in one easy lesson.

Well it takes all kinds and some folk do go ott but wearing wool has not meant any harm to the sheep so what is the problem. ?

I'd love my Spar to change to a Co-op.
As I eat organic, my fruit and veg is packaged, but only ever in a plastic bag, which I return to Waitrose. I have to drive to a Co-op. I have to drive to a Tesco which has some organic veg, but not much.

Someone asked how does a vegan know their food is vegan. You have to trust the manufacturers. However if you find out that it isn't, you tell either the shop or your local trading standards.
There has been a problem with labelling foods containing shellac as vegan. If you find your Christmas chocolate unnaturally shiny, it could have been coated with shellac, from crushed beetles wings, something vegans have to look out for.
Many manufacturers just say vegetarian rather than vegan because it's easier, better than being challenged.
I presume you've seen the news about the restaurant in Shropshire?

I've made a few comments on the other vegan thread that's been going recently, so thought I'd share my two pennies on here too. I'm vegan and don't wear wool or leather, or eat honey, but I do have animals, who I love dearly. Most of the vegan people I know have animals themselves (usually rescues - in fact, the friend that encouraged me to try veganism has a rescue charity). I also haven't chucked out a couple of leather items with sentimental value that I had before I went vegan. To each their own - to me it's not about holding yourself to saintly standards, it's about doing your best.

I think a lot of people feel most satisfied to imagine vegans as 'bizarre extremists' but the truth is that we're mostly just very normal people who happen not to want to consume certain products. And by not consuming those products, I wonder if that in turn makes the people that do feel like they are being judged. In my experience, this is not the case. I respect a meat eater's decision to do so, but respect goes both ways! Both my family and most of the people I've spoken to about my diet/lifestyle (they're usually the ones asking the questions) have been very supportive and interested, I'm happy to say.

Regarding the 'what would happen to all the cows/sheep/pigs etc.' argument, is it natural for these animals to be mass 'produced' and factory farmed? Is that what nature intended, I wonder?

Rainforests have been cut down in swathes to make way for crops for animal feed and for animal grazing, and there have been many studies that show how much plant-based food could be produced to feed a population compared to that which animal rearing could (it's a lot more!) Having said that, I also don't know many (if any) vegans who think they'll live to see a world where everyone is vegan - it's unrealistic and contrary to popular belief, we're not all raving loonies Of course there are some out there who are a bit preachy and annoying (believe me, they get on other vegans' nerves as well!), but then there are plenty of carnivores who think it's funny to put a bag of pork sausages in the veggie section of the frozen aisle As I said, I think respect goes both ways