Do you have silk clothes? If the answer is “yes,” then you are clearly swimming in money, because such clothes are very expensive. But today you will learn something that will make the desire to wear them disappear completely. 
Because silk production is a genocide of hundreds and hundreds of living beings, which has been going on for several millennia.
Silk producers are silkworms. Forget everything you knew about insects: the silkworm is white, fluffy and very cute. They don’t engage in sabotage and don’t even really know how to fly - they have coexisted with humans for too long. 
Adult butterflies do not feed, as their digestive system hardly works.
Butterflies live no more than two weeks. During this time, males must have time to hang out with females, who, in turn, must have time to leave offspring. The ladies lay their eggs in small piles. This process lasts on average three days, and the number of rounds can reach 700 pieces. 
Damn, the blackberries haven't ripened...
Caterpillars eat mulberry leaves. When they emerge from the eggs, they look like tiny worms, but the babies get fat at such a speed that it’s as if there is a small black hole inside each of them. After 4 weeks, the millimeter-sized malipuskis turn into huge wupsenes 5–7 cm long. 
By the way, the white color of the caterpillars perfectly camouflages the larva under... the guano of birds and other animals.
Having gained the required mass, the big guys find a comfortable place and weave themselves with that same silk thread, creating a thick cocoon around their body. The construction process lasts more than a day, and the length of the thread can exceed 1.5 kilometers! Inside this fantastic structure they pupate and overwinter. Or they don’t hibernate, if it happens in the summer, but immediately turn into butterflies. 
This is me, only in the future.
It is not known who was the first to learn how to extract silk threads from silkworm cocoons, but we can confidently say: this man soon became the main moneymaker of his village. Even today, natural silk is highly valued. 
All stages of caterpillar maturation.
About 10 thousand years have passed since that moment. All this time, silkworms and people do not separate for a minute. People create unique clothes, and fat butterflies are so accustomed to greenhouse conditions that they can no longer exist without people. We provided them with the best conditions for existence! 
Where has it been seen that a person does not kill caterpillars, but raises them on purpose?
Such a symbiosis may seem idyllic, but in fact it hides mass violence and the brutal deaths of billions of insects that never became adult butterflies. The trouble is that the cocoon cannot simply be taken and unwound: the threads in it are tightly glued together. Waiting for the larva to emerge from the cocoon is also not an option. It will tear all the fiber. 
The most popular silk is white, but there are also “colored” breeds of silkworms. You can also adjust the color by feeding the caterpillars with food coloring.
To separate the connected threads, the cocoons, along with the living larvae, are thrown into boiling water. Think about it: every year, billions and billions of innocent insects die horrific deaths so that someone can show off a cool silk dress or enjoy the softness of silk panties! 
Goodbye dear dolls...
Perhaps you will be reassured by the fact that boiled pupae, freed from cocoons, are not wasted: they are fried, baked and used to prepare many different dishes. In short, waste-free production. If you're in China, be sure to try silkworm food, they say it's tasty and nutritious.
Such is the difficult relationship people have with these butterflies. On the one hand - honor and respect, and on the other - massacres and millions of caterpillars that never became butterflies...
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