One of the most common excuses that people choose to hold on to, convincing themselves that it’s o.k. to exploit animals, mainly regarding to eating meat, is that it is natural.
It is much easier for them to live with themselves, after they decided that it is o.k. for humans to use animals, regardless of their horrible everyday reality.
They don’t look for the truth but a superficial excuse to hold on to.
No matter how ridicules it is, how inconsecutive it is, they don’t care as long as they got something to say when they are asked about meat eating.

Simple biology facts are off hand canceled when they do not fit their convenient habits. Humans’ extreme alienation from nature is being forgotten when they are hungry or feel like buying new shoes. Then, all of a sudden every human is a natural born hunter.

How can humans not be aware of this absurd argument? Especially when they claim it while being in an elevator or their car! With an air conditioner! With a stereo system! With clothes on of course, sunglass and a cell phone! Very “natural” indeed.

There is a very little chance to convince such a fixated, apathetic and selfish creature to even listen and maintain a rational conversation. Convincing someone to entirely change his lifestyle is very, very rare.

The wool industry is a representative example of the “it is natural” excuse. In order to keep the conscience clear, humans seriously believe that shearing sheep’s wool is some kind of twisted symbiosis. They are right. It’s a symbiosis between the world’s two best friends, humanity and greed.

Many people believe that shearing helps sheep who might otherwise be burdened with too much wool. But without human interference, sheep grow just enough wool to protect themselves from temperature extremes. The fleece provides effective insulation against both cold and heat.

Sheep were domesticated about 10,000 years ago. They are bred to suit human requirements and bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors.

Wool is not taken from sheep that live a pleasant life on a lush grassy knoll. Sheep are raised for financial gain and the wool provides a very significant economical part that actually maintains the meat industry. It is a misconception that wool is simply a by-product of the meat industry and that one might even be providing a service by 'using it up'.

Sheep are by nature nervous, shy animals and are often actually frozen with terror. They are roughly treated - grabbed for injections, sheared, artificially inseminated, dipped, tagged, castrated and tail-docked. They die of cold, heat or thirst and suffer appalling diseases, which often go unnoticed.

Genetic manipulations don’t skip the wool industry thus to provide more surface area for wool, meaning more wool for greater profits, Merinos (the most common type of sheep used in the wool industry) were bred for excess skin wrinkles. Extra skin means extra suffer.

This unnatural overload of wool causes the sheep to die of heat exhaustion during hot months. The wrinkles also collect urine and moisture which attract flies. The flies lay eggs in the folds of the skin, and the hatched maggots literally eat the sheep alive.
To prevent "flystrike", Australian ranchers perform extremely violent operation - "mulesing" which is cutting huge strips of skin off the lambs’ backs, while they are fully conscious. This is done to cause smooth, scarred skin that won't harbor fly eggs.
Yet the bloody wounds often get flystrike before they heal, and despite the feeling by many that mulesing may kill more sheep than it saves, the mutilation continues.

The true horror of flystrike cannot be described or imagined. The sheep’s flesh is slowly consumed by thousands of swarming maggots.
The sheep become so distressed that they cannot eat, drink or sleep.
Sheep can die within a few days, but many linger for up to several weeks, often in the burning sun without relief of shade. This results in millions of slow agonizing deaths each year.

Going through this brutal mutilation, or suffering from the horrible disease of flystrike, and sometimes both, either way the sheep lose.

Wool insulates sheep from the cold and from the heat. Selective breeding ensures more wool than is actually natural or necessary. Whilst in full fleece, they find it difficult to cope with local irritations and usually rub against a post or rail (sheep rarely groom each other). In the absence of a suitable object to rub against, they will roll on their backs. When in full fleece or heavily pregnant they may fail to get up, and if not seen, will die.

Most of the sheep are shorn for the first time at 14-15 months old, and then annually. Humans like to believe that wool harvesting causes little or no discomfort, that the wool is shaved from the outside of the sheep, much like a haircut, leaving the animal cool and comfortable for the summer. Wild sheep have the ability to shed their own wool during the warm months and retain it during the winter. But shearing is nothing like shedding.
The sheep are thrown on their backs and restrained while an electric razor is aggressively running over their bodies.
Whether sheared manually or mechanically, cuts are very common.
Careless shearing can injure teats, genitals, other appendages and ligaments.
In the mechanical shearing, sheep are held in restraints with tight clamps on their faces and then are sheared.

Wool is usually removed from sheep during the early summer. However, many times it is done very early in spring or winter. Wet, windy and cold conditions can result in severe diseases, and in some cases, death. It takes 7-8 weeks for the coat to grow sufficiently to protect the animal.
Naked to the world, sheep are put back out to pasture where they can suffer severe sunburn or freeze.

Not all the lambs recognize their mother without her coat and the ewe may not be able to recognize her lambs correctly because their scent was changed.
If shearing is to be done before lambing, the handling of the ewe, close to her due date, may cause birth difficulties.

When shearing, speed is everything. Shearers are usually paid per sheep, not per hour, which encourages working quickly and carelessly. Says one eyewitness: "the shearing shed must be one of the worst places in the world for cruelty to animals. I have seen shearers punch sheep with their shears or fists until the sheep's noses bled. I have seen sheep with half their faces shorn off."

Death can occur because of the rough shearing. Shearers twist the sheep into an organ-damaging position, when the health of the sheep is already poor because being stripped of wool is already a shock to the sheep.

Under natural conditions sheep reproduce every spring after a five month pregnancy. They produce a single lamb with each gestation (twins are relatively rare in nature). But genetic selection and intensive feeding have created a situation whereby twins and even triplets are commonplace, although sheep only have two teats and can only feed one or two lambs.

Lambing time has also been manipulated. Instead of taking place in spring, between 10% and 15% of the annual lamb “crop” is now produced between December and the end of February. The aim is to get the lambs to market ahead of the competitors. Within days of their birth, the surviving youngsters are doomed to face the winter weather.

During lambing, "spare" lambs are forced to be adopted by ewes with a spare teat (ewes that their lambs died). One way that this is done is to skin a dead infant and put the skin over the "spare" lamb - it is hoped that this will persuade the ewe that the new lamb is in fact her own.
The ewe may also be held by her neck in 'stocks' for up to three days to prevent her from rejecting the newly born lamb.

The rape

The oestrus of each ewe may be manipulated so that they give birth at the same time.
This is a much more convenient option for farmers. Progesterone sponges are inserted into the vagina (the sponge insertion can cause damage) and are left in for two weeks and then pregnant mares' serum gonadotrophin (PMSG) is injected into each ewe.
Teaser male sheep are often used in the flocks, to help the whole process along.
Semen is collected from the males by using an artificial vagina. Breeding sheep have their semen extracted by giving them painful electrical shocks via a probe that's driven deep into their anus.

Weaning, castration and tail docking

The practice of placing newly-weaned ewes on minimal rations of food and restricted water supplies to dry off milk production has been carried out for many years, supposedly to reduce both discomfort and the potential development of mastitis, but there is no scientific basis for that.

Shortly after birth, lambs are subjected to a very painful mutilation: tail-docking. The tails of all lambs are cut off, mainly to reduce the urine and faeces staining, which attracts sheep blowflies. The tails are either cut off with a knife, or made to drop off by applying tight rubber rings to restrict the blood supply.

The males are also castrated in order to prevent unplanned breeding and to reduce aggression, even though many lambs are slaughtered before they reach sexual maturity.
Castration is carried out by the following methods: The most common technique is to restrict the blood supply to the testicles using a tight rubber ring, causing them to wither and drop off within a few weeks.
The procedure is carried out without anesthetic, to lambs under one week of age. The second and less common procedure is a surgical castration involving cutting the skin, this is carried out without anesthetic, to lambs up to three months of age.
Hemorrhage and local infections are always a risk and may lead to death.
It is just as painful on the day of birth as it is at several weeks of age.

The tails of all lambs are cut off, mainly to reduce the urine and faeces staining, which attracts sheep blowflies. Tails are either cut off with a knife, or made to drop off by applying tight rubber rings.

Sheep are identified by the following methods:

Ear notching - carried out from a few days of age up to about 8 weeks, causing pain and bleeding. The sheep’s ear is sensitive just as much as any other organ.
Ear tagging - carried out at any age may cause infection and fly strike around the tag hole particularly in the summer.
Horn branding - carried out when sufficient horn has grown at about 12 months of age which may cause pain if not carried out on the insensitive part of the horn.

Aging sheep are subjected to "tooth-grinding", an unanesthetized procedure that sheep farmers claim to reduce tooth loss and extends the sheep's productive life.
Electrical grinder is used to wear down the teeth. Another method involves using the edge of a disc cutter to cut right through the teeth near the level of the gums. This terrifying and painful procedure exposes the sensitive pulp cavities and causes the teeth to bleed.

Excessively faced with such vast amounts of death and disease, the rational step would be to reduce the numbers of sheep so as to maintain the existing ones decently. Instead, sheep are forced to bear more lambs by the administration of drugs. Malnourished ewes are taken into laboratories and placed in climate-controlled chambers to determine how much exposure they can withstand before they die.

But the greatest cause of pain and discomfort, which is very unlikely to ever be totally eradicated, is lameness.

One of the main causes of lameness is foot-rot. Research has shown that foot-rot in sheep can result in higher death rate and increased susceptibility to fly strike. It spreads from sheep to sheep via pasture or bedding, contaminated with bacteria from the feet of infected sheep (which may be symptomless carriers).

"Farmers weekly" wrote at February 1997 that 92% of sheep were found lame in flocks, covered by a Royal Veterinary College survey, relating to 758,252 ewes and 427,277 lambs.
If 5,980,000,000 humans (92% of the human population) suffered from lameness, what would you think about the Only One Solution then?
What is the difference?
You are not a speciesist are you?

Like other "commodities", animals often fall victim to fluctuations in the economy, such as the following example: In 1990, 10 million Australian sheep were shot and buried in mass graves when they became practically valueless due to a lingering drought and low wool prices.

Sheep's’ tails are docked, they are raped, castrated, mulesed, sheared, prodded, packed, shipped and slaughtered.
Every year, ewes experience the labor of lambing and the loss of their frightened babies when they are being cramped into the transportation trucks.
Every year sheep are being raped.
Every year the ewes are impregnated all over again.
Every year sheep are violently sheared.
Every year, lambs experience harsh weather, brutal mutilations, separation from their mothers, and slaughter.

All of what you have just read is done for fashionable reasons. We must not accept this world.

Working with humans, hopping they’ll voluntarily give up their total control position, their god status, is stupidly naive and morally dangerous.
We must tear the domination from them.