5 things you might not realise are cruel

Doing the research for Living Cruelty Free, I was shocked to discover there were things I had no idea involved so much animal cruelty.

1. Merino wool - I wrongly assumed sheep were simply sheared. Imagine you have chunks of your flesh hacked off. Would it hurt? Of course it would, yet this is what happens to most sheep in Australia in a process known as "mulesing." Farmers do this to prevent the animals getting fly strike. 

The worst think about this is its needless because farmers can breed fly strike resistant sheep but they refuse to do this. Despite pressure from top clothing stores like Next and Marks and Spencer who readily sell merino products but said they would try and use only wool from sheep not subjected to this abhorrent practice, the practice of mulesing still goes on.

2. Chocolate - To feed the inexhaustible demand for milk chocolate you need milk and this means male calves go without. They can't produce milk so they are often killed or dumped in veal crates.

For an alternative to milk chocolate, go for dark chocolate or carob, which tastes like chocolate and comes from a plant. I've read in places that it can't compete with real chocolate, but it can IMHO. The good news is that unlike real chocolate, its NOT harmful to dogs or cats. 

3. Horse racing - Those horses love to run and jump don't they? Maybe in the wild they do, but with a jockey on their back, kicking into their sides and even using a whip, somehow I doubt it.

Horses are pushed to extremes, often beyond their endurance, and unlike the recent case of Fox Hunt in the $1 Dubai Gold Cup whose leg snapped, when they die or get injured it's rarely reported. Well, we can't have the enjoyment of race goers diminished by the site of a majestic animal being shot.

4. Fake/Faux Fur – Real fur is such a hard sell that it’s been passed off as fake in garments like coats, hats and waistcoats. Quite often this "fake fur" comes from China which kills animals like dogs and cats to produce the so called fake or faux fur.

Personally, I would never wear faux fur or anything fake that resembles fur, as I strongly believe that it may inadvertently encourage people to wear real fur because it looks so real. That said, of course I would rather people wore the fake kind than the real kind. 

5. Free range eggs – The boy chicks can’t lay eggs and are killed. This is done by crushing or gassing. If it’s crushing the method used is called IMD - Instantaneous Mechanical Destruction. This involves dropping handfuls of babies alive into a mincing machine in a process.

Hens also have their beaks trimmed – an extremely painful process using a hot metal blade. This has been likened to having a limb amputated.

4 Reasons why it’s manly NOT to eat meat

The sad fact is that more women that men are vegetarian or vegan. The one reason for this apparently (or so I’ve been told) is that it’s not seen as manly to be vegetarian.

Men don't need to act like cavemen any more

1- Showing compassion towards animals is a sign of strength and not weakness. Well, if a man were to dominate a woman would he be considered as manly? Maybe in days gone past when women had little rights he might have been but not these days.

2- There’s nothing manly about eating meat when we are continually being told that meat is bad for your. It increases your risk of getting cancer and heart disease and a whole range of illnesses. Vegetarians are also less likely to be obese and being obese means you are at a higher risk of ending up with diabetes.

Vegetarian Joaquin Phoenix - is he man enough for you?

3- Associating meat with masculinity goes back to the days when humans had to hunt in order to survive. These days nobody needs to hunt in order to survive. You just need to grow your own food or go to the supermarket.

4- Meat consumption has been linked to virility, yet a low sperm count has been linked with eating too much meat. A study in 2007 found a link between American men being unable to father children and their mother’s eating too much beef whilst pregnant.

This was blamed on the growth hormones in the beef that were fed to cows when they were alive. Other types of meat such as chicken also have traces of growth hormones.

Click here for a link to yet another survey.