Okay, so I understand cutting out meat and dairy and eggs, and I can even grasp honey,
leather, and wool. But silk? I mean, they’re worms.
And we’re only taking the silk they make. So, what’s the big deal?
But it’s so soft and luxurious!
And it’s got such a luster!
But I’m-
But you-
Well it’s not like-
And-
But-
You make a compelling point, sir.
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. With all the considerations
vegans must make, one that tends to be low on the list is silk. The cruelty of meat,
dairy and eggs is painfully evident to anyone who takes a moment to look into their production.
Even honey and wool, after some digging or vegan-nugget-watching,
Yeah
are accepted as inhumane exploitative products. But what about silk? How is it even made and why should vegans
be concerned? Well to start off, the kind of silk production
we’re going to focus on today is that of silkworms, but it should be noted that silk
is produced by a number of insects like Embioptera, commonly known as webspinners, Hymenoptera
(bees, wasps, and ants), silverfish, mayflies, thrips, leafhoppers, beetles, lacewings, fleas,
flies, and midges. Other types of arthropods also produce silk, most notably various arachnids
such as spiders. Spider silk is experimentally being used in the medical field to mend bones
and for military purposes to produce an alternative to kevlar via inserting spider genes into
goats so that they excrete silk in their milk, from which protective vests are made.
I am not making this sh*t up. The silkworms responsible for the vast majority
of commercial silk production, are the Bombyx mori domesticated and selectively bred from
the wild Bombyx mandarina. The earliest evidence of silk and silkworm domestication dates back
over 5,000 years ago to 3630 BCE in ancient China where sericulture, or silk farming,
was born. The Chinese emperors tried to keep silk production secret in order to maintain
a monopoly, but by around 200BC sericulture has already crossed into Korea and later Japan and India.
Now just a note, some of the statistics in this
video vary widely as various sources seem to disagree as to the actual numbers and/or
are unclear in their exact units. I’ve done my best to give you a general impression of
the numbers given and document my sources in the blog post for this video, which is
linked up there and in the video description below. Now, to understand why silk may be objectionable
to vegans, we need to understand how silk is made. And to understand how silk is made,
we first need to understand the life cycle of the Bombyx mori, which we’ll go over
in brief. Don’t ya love how thorough I am?
Don't...don't you?
When a Bombyx mori lays eggs, they typically hatch within 10-14 days. However, depending
on the needs of the farmer, they're often placed in refrigeration for months at a time
up to a year. Once warmed back up again, they generally hatch in the same timeframe. The hatchlings
need to be fed immediately as they have a voracious appetite and will die from dehydration
and starvation very quickly. The Bombyx mori have a preference for the white mulberry leaves
Their name is actually Latin for “silkworm of the mulberry tree”, and mulberry silk
is considered to be the finest and most lustrous. The hatchlings eat constantly and go through
five instars, the term for the developmental stage between molts. Over a period of about
35 days, Bombyx mori shed their skin four times, ending up 10,000 times heavier and
30 times longer than they were upon hatching. Once they’ve reached their fifth instar,
they enter their pupal stage and encase themselves in cocoons of pure silk.
The silk itself is secreted from two salivary glands on the head of the larvae and consists
of two proteins: fibroin, the structural center and sericin, the “gum” which cements the filaments.
Yes, those elegant dresses and luxurious sheets...are worm spit.
Given the bee regurgitation we like to sweeten our coffee and pastries with, there seems to be a human
fascination with utilizing the oral excretions of insects.
Moving along. Each cocoon is composed of filaments up to 3,000 feet or 914 meters in length.
So at this point, you may be thinking- what’s
the harm in harvesting this silk? The little buggers spit it out and sleep in it for a
little bit, but it’s not like they’re going to live there forever. Well this is
where the silk production process takes a turn. You see, to get out of their cocoons,
silkworms, who are at this point, moths, chew their way out, thus severely shortening the length
of the silk threads and decreasing their value, and the luster of the material produced.
To avoid this destruction of raw materials, silk farmers will stifle, meaning kill, the
pupae by either baking them, immersing them in boiling water, or less commonly, freezing
them, or piercing them with a needle. This is performed generally between 2 days and
2 weeks after spinning has begun, before they transform into moths.
Once the pupae are dead cocoons are then soaked in water to be more easily unraveled. The
pupae are then discarded or, in some countries, eaten.
If allowed to live past their pupal stage, they would emerge from their cocoons as moths,
mate, lay eggs, and die naturally after about a week, as they can no longer eat, and rely
purely upon the nutrients that they took in during their larval stage.
So, just how many silkworms are killed every year for the production of silk? Well this
is where I found the greatest variation in statistics. Many articles and websites were re-pasting
the same statistical table sourced from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations from 2005. And the blanket number of 70 million pounds for the amount of raw
silk produced each year. The most recent figures available from the
FAO are from 2012 and state that worldwide 161,661 metric tons (MT) of raw silk was produced,
meaning 161,661,000kg or 356,401,498lbs, which far dwarfs the 70 million repeated time and
again. This larger figure is closely echoed by the International Sericulture Commission,
which gives a slightly more conservative estimation of 152,846 MT for 2012 and provides a 2013
figure of 159,776 MT. Now as far as how many silkworms that means?
Those numbers vary as well, but the average range given was 4,400-14,969 per kg. The higher
figure was provided by Kusuma Rajaiah- an Indian government officer and the creator
of Ahimsa silk, which we’ll address in just a moment. When he estimated that 15 worms
are killed per gram of silk. If we go with the more conservative 2013 estimate
from the ISC of 159,776 MT, and apply the range of worms killed per kilogram, we end
up with anywhere between over 730 billion and over 2 trillion worms killed for silk
in 2013. If we take the farm more conservative and, as far as I could tell uncited figure
of 70 million pounds, we still end up with between over 139 billion and over 475 billion
worms killed in a given year. For a fabric that accounts for less than 0.2%
of the worlds fiber market. That’s a pretty staggering death toll.
Another way silkworms are used is for the production of what's called silkworm gut,
which is mainly used to make fly-fishing leaders. For silkworm gut, silkworms are killed by
methods such as submersion in a vinegar solution, just before they are about to spin and their
silk glands are removed and stretched into strong threads, which look and feel much like plastic.
As for whether silkworms or other insects in general
are sentient and able to experience pain, studies conducted with morphine demonstrate
insects’ responses as being indicative of an ability to feel pain, but the scientific
community remains conflicted. Silkworms do possess a central nervous system and brain,
and definitely display nociception, but an in-depth investigation as to their ability
to feel pain will have to be another video entirely. For an explanation of the difference
between nociception and pain, see this video.
But even if we assume that their death is painless- and we all know what assumptions do.
It's still a death, and a human-induced premature one at that.
An alternative to this method of silk production has arisen called “peace silk” or “Ahimsa silk",
after the Sanskrit term for non-violence. There are a number of sources and methods
under the “peace silk” umbrella and not all are much different than the traditional approach.
The most idealized version of peace silk is that which is harvested in the wild
from the empty cocoons of silk moths. Eri silk is one made from the cocoons
of Samia ricini, who leave a little hole in their cocoon from which they emerge.
This type of silk cannot be processed like Bombyx mori silk and accounts for a very small portion
of the silk market. Ahimsa silk, which I mentioned briefly earlier, is made from Bombyx mori
who have been allowed to go through their metamorphosis and emerge from their cocoons
before the cocoons are harvested. The clarity of various peace silk suppliers’
actual practices can be difficult to ascertain. Silk moth cultivator Michael Cook wrote
an article criticizing the various peace silk methods, pointing to the potential deaths
inherent in the next generation of eggs and hatchlings and the unrealistic idealized notion
of wild-picked vacated cocoons. Now Mr. Cook himself raises and kills silk worms, so his
input on the possible ethical conflicts of peace silk is certainly interesting to say the least.
Peace silk producers have and will refute such criticisms, but I think it’s important
to fully and deeply investigate any so-called “humane” methods of animal product and
byproduct production, and to ask the question of whether the use of living beings in any
form can be ethical? Regardless of their treatment, the fact remains
that domesticated silk worms are exploited for their silk. They have been selectively
bred with the sole purpose of producing as much silk as possible, much like the animals
of the food industry who have been bred into disfigured absurdities to large to support
their own bodyweight. The adult Bombyx mori cannot even fly. They also cannot eat due
to their reduced mouthpart and small heads. A fact which is often cited as evidence of
human manipulation, but this is true of all Saturniidae or giant silk moths.
Still, these beings are bred, enslaved, and slaughtered for an unnecessary luxury fabric.
If you feel the term of enslavement and slaughter are unfitting for an insect, I would urge
you to watch this video with vegan activist Gary Yourofsky on speciesism.
Just because these tiny creatures look so foreign and unlike us doesn’t mean they
deserve exploitation. Their lives may seem brief and inconsequential, but the same could
be said for us from an outside perspective. The fact remains they are living beings all
their own, with brains and nerves, and desires. Now I can’t presume to know the desires
of a silkworm, but I think it’s safe to say that none of them are becoming your dress or bed sheets.
Luckily, there are numerous alternatives to
silk including rayon, nylon, milkweed seed pod fibers, silk-cotton tree, and ceiba tree
filaments, polyester, tencel, and lyocell (a type of cellulose fiber). So, you can stay
silky without the cruelty. Now I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Were you aware of the way silk is made? Do you find it problematic? Do you think the
“peace silk” methods are acceptable or is the use of being in any form exploitative?
Let me know in the comments! The time it took to produce this video clocks
in at about [51 hours]. If you’d like to help support Bite Size Vegan so I can keep putting in the
hours to bring you this educational resource, please check out the support links in the
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If you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up and share it around to show that
even the smallest beings deserve respect, protection, and freedom. If you’re new here,
be sure to hit that big red subscribe button down there for more awesome vegan content
every Monday, Wednesday, and some Fridays. And hey, check out some of my related videos
like Gary Yourofsky talking about bugs in general, and whether honey or wool are vegan.
And remember, extra resources and citations for everything I talked about are in the blog
post for this video linked up below and in the sidebar.
Now go live Vegan and I'll see you soon.
What if I just open the cocoon for you.
What if I opened it and had some food for you?
Oh…you can’t eat.
Of course there is one ethical version of silk- Silk plant milk!
Except for the version that they came out recently with honey in it.
Why, Silk, why!
Why must you un-veganize our vegan things?
Can’t we have anything nice!?