Wool is just a haircut, and sheep need shearing.
Short answer: Wool isn't a free haircut. It funds mulesing, skin cut off live lambs, speed-shearing injuries, and a live-export trade that has killed millions of sheep at sea.
Wool's biggest exporter is Australia, where these practices are standard or recently legal.
RSPCA Australia; independent observer reports on live export
The objection
“Wool isn’t slaughter. Sheep have to be shorn anyway or they overheat, you’re literally helping them. It’s just a haircut.”
The answer
Modern wool breeds need shearing only because we bred them to grow far more wool than any wild sheep. We manufactured the dependence. And the “haircut” framing hides what funds it.
Start with mulesing. To prevent flystrike in wrinkly Merinos (again, a problem of how we bred them), flaps of skin are cut from the hindquarters of fully conscious lambs, often with no anaesthetic, leaving a raw scarred wound (RSPCA Australia). It is routine across the Australian wool industry, the world’s largest. The RSPCA itself states these sheep “have not been ethically bred.”
Shearing is paid per sheep, not per hour, and that piece-rate speed produces cuts, gashes and rough handling, documented repeatedly in undercover footage across major wool nations.
Then the end of the line. Sheep no longer wanted for wool feed the live export trade. Independent analysis of 53 voyages from 2018–2023 found more than 6,500 sheep died at sea, many from starvation, disease and heat stress. Over the three decades to 2010, more than 2.6 million sheep were recorded dead on Middle East routes (RSPCA Australia). Australia has now legislated to end live sheep export by sea by 2028, an admission of how bad it was.
A jumper doesn’t kill a sheep on its own. It pays into an industry of cutting, speed and ships, and at the end of it the same slaughterhouse as lamb.