Quote Originally Posted by wilomn View Post
I notice you have a harp in your avatar. Are those gut strings or metal?

While I do understand your point of view, unless you are a total vegan, wearing no animal products, eating no animal products, eating only what has fallen naturally from the parent plant, using no manmade anything, it's a bit of a........step to be so condeming to those who disagree with you.

Afterall, if you can do as you like, hurting no one but yourself, why can't the guy who raises and harvests animals, be they chickens or cows or snakes?
Good eye about the avatar. Harps generally use 4 separate types of string. The 1st octave is almost exclusively nylon, the 2nd & 3rd is usually nylon or gut (or synthetic gut, although fibrocarbon is becoming popular these days with folk harps), and the 4th is a metal core wrapped with much thinner metal, leaving the 5th-7th (if we are talking about a pedal harp, as a large Celtic harp such as mine only has 1st-5th) uses pure silk wrapped with silver plated metal.

To answer your question; my harp has natural gut strings in the 2nd & 3rd octave. The gut is sheep, and is from mutton stock – IE: sheep that are used for food. They are imported from England. Some people prefer to use European goat gut, which are also from foodstock animals. Not too many people use cow, as the tone it produces tends to be ‘dry’ and the strings themselves are usually more brittle.

No, I do not wear animal products, although if the leather in a jacket or boots happened to be from a cow that was slaughtered for food, I’d not really have a problem with it. But as a personal preference, I just don’t. With the amount of alternatives available these days, I’m never short on choices!

As I intentionally stated; I do not have a problem with respectfully hunting/killing animals for food (chickens and cows). I am not vegetarian/vegan. I am an omnivore.

In my earlier post I was speaking only to the matter of raising animals to be killed for no other reason than their fur, or skin, as it were (snakes, mink, chinchilia, etc). These animals are not food, and IMO their deaths serve no purpose other than to drive a fickle industry forward in the quest for what is momentarily ‘fashionable.’ That is what I find troubling and even offensive.

If you disagree with my personal thoughts on the matter, that is completely your right. However, please do not suggest that I was ‘condemning’ anybody. I try to respect other people’s opinions, as I would want my own respected. This is why I opened my statements with “IMO” and concluded with “on a personal level.”