Josie's Guide to Vegan Friendly Instruments
Josie's Guide to Vegan Friendly Instruments
cross-posted from: https://vegantheoryclub.org/post/475246
Well, here it is!
A few days ago, I made a post appealing for information relating to animal product usage in the music instrument industry. Historically, musical instruments have used animal products. Typically, drumheads were made of animal skin, piano keys of ivory, and violin bows of horsehair. A lot of these processes have been phased out (most drums use Mylar for their skins now, and ivory was banned for pianos in the 80s.)
Here are some patterns I've noticed while creating this sheet:
- Drums and harmonicas are the "most vegan" instruments
- Acoustic pianos are much more likely to use wool than electric pianos
- The violin industry is the worst for animal products. Most violin manufacturers still use bows with horsehair.
- Manufacturers specialising in introductory/student products, such as Sigma and Franz Hoffmann, tend to use animal-derived materials rather than synthetic ones.
- Actual saxophones are vegan, but a lot of manufacturers use genuine leather straps. All companies that use leather for their straps have been labelled as orange. Trumpets, flugel horns, tubas, and trombones are seemingly okay regardless of manufacturer. Some flutes used to use ivory but again, this practice was banned in 1989.
- I discovered that clarinets tend to use goat skin for their pads. Unfortunately, I could not find any information on exactly which companies use animal skin for their clarinets. Sorry.
Another thing I've noticed is that information relating to this topic is EXTREMELY muddy. I would often find a source claiming that a manufacturer did not use animal products only to double check their information pages and see that they use wool. I would find sources claiming a manufacturer isn't vegan only to check their information pages and see that they seemingly use no animal products. For this reason, I cannot guarantee that the information in the spreadsheet is 100% accurate, but this is the closest to accuracy I have been able to get to.
This sheet compiles the top manufacturers in each category of instrument. If anyone has any other manufacturers they'd like me to investigate, please just say so in the comments.
- The violin industry is the worst [...] use bows with horsehair. [...] genuine leather straps. [...] ivory [...] goat skin
How comes that horse hair is considered worse than skin and ivory? I would say removing a couple of hairs should be completely painless to a horse. Meanwhile, skinning requires killing of the animal. The removal of the tusks is at least very painful and sometimes also deadly for elephants.
When I say that the violin industry is the "worst" for animal products it means that the most violin manufacturers use them compared to the other instrument types
It was just a question and not meant to be a criticism of you(r post). I understood 'the worst for animal products' as 'horsehair is the most terrible animal product from a vegan point of view' (at least in comparison with other things in this list). I am not a musician and never knowingly saw a product with horse hair. I was just wondering if there's something about that that I didn't consider.
Capitalism will always find the most efficient way of producing horse hair without factoring in the consideration of the wellbeing of the horse.
Yeah, seems like I was too naive here...
Most horsehair comes from slaughtered horses. Hair for bows comes from tails of horses in cold climates, and is sorted by size. It comes primarily from stallions and costs $150–$400 per pound because of the sorting needed to extract long hairs. Mongolia produces 900 tons of horsehair per year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsehair
I didn't mean to justify horsehair products but seriously thought that you wouldn't need much of it to produce a couple of violin bows and that it sure won't hurt the horses. But man... 900 fucking tons and - as you predicted - horses are mostly killed.
And apparantly there's also a practice to pull out the hair and whiskers rather then cutting it off. And this is apparantly not even done to get the hair but to improve the horse's look.