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| The cruelty-free campaign in Australia |
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Choose Cruelty-Free is a non-profit organisation in Australia promoting the humane treatment of animals. They create yearly media campaigns and recently released a graphic video dramatising the equivalent effects of animal product testing procedures on a live human model, available on Youtube. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl4nr23tK3Y). |
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Mulesing and the Australian Wool Industry
Recently Australia's wool industry has been hit with another boycott from a major clothing company for continuing to practise mulesing on Aussie sheep.
Mulesing has been traditionally done on sheep to save them from blow fly maggot infestation, a condition known as flystrike, which leads to myiasis. Myiasis lowers the overall quality of sheared wool, kills a good number of infected sheep and adds to the cost of wool production to the tune of over a hundred million dollars annually.
Sheep farmers deal with myiasis in sheep when they're young, to minimise the pain of cutting. In light mulesing, a small fold of wrinkled skin is snipped off from the rump area, and then daubed with antiseptic, but without anaesthetic. Because mulesing was discovered through a shear cutting accident, wool trimming shears were the implements first used for the operation, until tool makers created specialised mulesing shears. Only the skin is cut and little bleeding results, after which a smoothened wool-less area remains. A thorough mulesing removes most of the rumps' skin, and may extend to the hind legs, creating a large wool-less area. Light mulesing, which most Merino sheep in Australia in large flocks undergo, simply reduces the amount of wool that can grow in the same area. The wool in mulesed sheep is less soiled and gets stained less.
Crutching is an alternative practice to mulesing, and is simply the repeated shearing of wool around the rump area as it grows. For many sheep farmers, crutching is too time-consuming and uneconomical for managing large sheep flocks.
Mulesing Alternatives
Animal activists and cruelty-free campaigners view mulesing as a practice that causes unnecessary suffering to sheep and a brand of mutilation that all animals should be spared from. Alternatives to mulesing have been found and implemented, but not yet on an economically viable scale for the wool industry. Amongst these measures are the use of breech clips, which covers the rump folds with plastic; blowfly eradication and control, using environmentally sound insecticides and plant-based chemicals; genetic testing of sheep to acquire a blowfly-resistant population; and skin-protein treatments of blowful infestation.
In response to an extensive animal-rights campaign, Australia's sheep industry association has agreed to complete a phase-out of mulesing by the end of 2010, but their latest word has led animal welfare activists to step up the pressure on the issue, thus the current ban on the use of mulesed sheep by many Swedish, North American and South Korean clothing outlets.
Alternatives to mulesing are being researched on by Australian Wool Innovation, which is supported by funds from the federal government and sheep farmers. Possible measures underway include selective breeding from sires that exhibit bare breeches, pain relief for mulesed sheep, flytraps, improved sheep hearding practices and drug treatment. In New Zealand, mulesing is already on the way out, but Australia's wooling industry faces more challenges in the face of its 2010 deadline.
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