But is this giant widow silk cruelty-free and ethically sourced. Do the spiders consent
Viewing post in 📰 [Week 16: The Tapestry] Results and discussion
Yes! They’re extremely comfortable and well-fed. 🙂
When Peter pitched this week’s story, I asked, “Does it have to be giant spiders? What about giant silkworms, those would be slightly less creepy,” but he pointed out normally silk worms are killed to harvest their silk, and obviously we can’t have that! So giant spiders it is.
Some folk in India do “ethical silk” where they let silkworms mature and fly away from cocoons in trees, and then carefully spin the leftover cocoons!
I don’t know how well that works out for the silkworms in practice, but in either case I think spiders are cute and I think in the fantasy setting it’s way more interesting to get often-demonised giant spiders anyway :3