The Cruelty Behind Silk

Yes, it’s a luxurious fabric and beautiful to wear, but the cruelty behind silk is such that vegans refused to buy into this industry.

In a previous story, I wrote about how we get feathers and down, and although the birds are not deliberately killed for them, it still is horrific. Silk is another fabric that we tend to think of as being okay. I mean, they’re just grubs, after all. But there is cruelty behind the silk industry that we tend to overlook.

According to a legend mentioned in Confucius’ Odes’, roughly 2700 years BC, Princess Si-Ling-Chi, the wife of Emperor Huang-Ti, discovered the secret of silk by picking up a cocoon that had fallen from a tree into her hot tea. The Chinese then figured out the critical stages of the silk-making process. Firstly, the chrysalis (or pupae) needed to be stifled inside the cocoon before it emerged as a moth.

Resource: The Silk Museum

Silk stayed in China until the Silk Road opened around 130 BC, and the fabric started to be traded. But it was centuries later before other countries began to cultivate the silkworm, and when that happened, silk production expanded.

So that’s a very brief background, but how is silk made?