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audience is going to give to the departing sadhus? I suggested that men and women should take a vow of not to use silk and wool (wool will be discussed later here) for a year. My hope here was that if someone is willing to give up the use of silk and wool for a year, most probably it will be permanent and he and she will think twice before going back again to its use. Here again quite a large number of men and women took this
VOW.
I hope you too can do this but first it must start with you with a thought that you too might not manufacture, trade, buy, use, accept or present silk and its product in any shape and form. Now you decide: is this behavior consistent with ahimsa?
WOOL FOR BODY COVERING: IS WOOL TOO A PRODUCT OF HIMSA? The answer is yes. All wool is nothing but the hair of mostly domesticated (vegetarian) animals. Most of the wool that we use comes from sheep and goat. These animals are specially raised (like dairy farming) mainly for the purpose of wool and secondarily for meat. The major centers of wool production are New Zealand (with 60 million sheep; 20 times more than the human population of New Zealand), Kashmir, Australia, and several other places. In the books, many of us read when we were younger, sheep live happy lives, roaming free until they are carefully sheared and dying peacefully after a long, idyllic life. For most merino and other sheep in Australia and other places, such portraits are simply fairy tales. Every year, millions of gentle lambs endure painful mutilations in which tender skin is cut from their backsides. And when their usefulness as wool producers ends, thousands of terrified sheep are crammed onto multi-story ships to be transported for days and even weeks to countries where they will be violently slaughtered far from the paddocks where they were raised. Their painful deaths are little more than statistics
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An Ahimsa Crisis: You Decide
