Gaining support from farm animals is difficult and expensive, especially if one wants to do more than just convince people to refrain from ordering lamb. As evidenced Job According to scientists like Elan Abrell, sanctuary farms—those that rescue animals from a grim fate in agriculture and allow them to live out their lives as naturally as possible—take land, money, and hard work, and have few conceivable ways to make a profit. In this sense, Rainbow Wool, by selling the wool of rescued animals to pay for their lives – and, yes, by helping support gay charities in Germany – is a way of commodifying animals as gently as possible, saving them from the butcher's knife. And selling products means advertising, such as holding flashy shows of gay fashion clothes knitted from the wool of gay sheep.
Anthropomorphizing animals as “gay” may be a worthy first step toward making people aware of the sexual exploitation that almost all farm animals suffer. And Rainbow Wool does it in its own way. Buying expensive wool is unlikely to be enough to eliminate the harms of animal agriculture, but that doesn't mean it's useless. When it comes to meat politics, people often pit individual action against transformative “systemic” change. In our upcoming bookwe argue that it is wrong to view individual and collective action as either/or; we need both. Sometimes small, incremental changes made by individuals can help create new norms that lead to political change and ultimately structural change.
Schmidt may actually be doing something good, but that's not very good enough. In fact, the farm where Rainbow Wool's merry sheep are kept is located also a commercial sheep farmWhere another sheep are sent to slaughter. “This is a great gay capitalist story,” Carol Adams explained to us via email about the Grindr fashion show. But “it does not challenge animal agriculture in terms of its assumptions about animals being productive, or about females being pregnant, or about wearing wool.” Neither Rainbow Wool nor Grindr responded to requests for comment for this article by the time of publication.
