Four or five times in their lives, they will squirm as a plucker tears out five ounces of their feathers. A skilled plucker can handle 100 birds a day. After the last plucking, the geese have five weeks to grow more feathers before they are sent through a machine that plucks their longest feathers. People also gather eider down from the nests of female eider ducks, who pluck the down from their breasts to line their nests and cover their eggs. Apart from the cruelty involved in its production, down has drawbacks as a cold- weather insulator that synthetic insulators do not have.
Silk is the fibre silkworms weave to make cocoons.
To obtain the silk, silk distributors boil the worms alive in their cocoons. Humane alternatives to silk include nylon, milkweed seed pod fibers, silk-cotton tree and ceiba tree filaments, and rayon. A Cruelty-free Cosmetics Campaign was prepared in 1992 for the SPCA but was not put into effect because of lack of funds. EarthCare is also interested in this subject - if they can find a commercial sponsor.