Sheep's bottoms part Australia's wool growers

May 15, 2008, 12:36 GMT

Dubbo, Australia - It's taken five years for some Australian sheep farmers to accept that customers don't want lambs to have their backsides skinned so flies won't lay eggs there.

Never mind that mulesing saves sheep from a painful death from flesh-eating maggots: people shopping in the high street for tailored suits and woolly jumpers just don't like mulesing and demand farmers use other methods to prevent flystrike.

Norman Blackman, who travels the country persuading farmers to switch, puts his case in very simple language.

'Retailers respond to community demands and have expectations in the way their garments are produced,' he told farmers in Dubbo, 400 kilometres north of Sydney. 'If you take into account the concept of taking skin off the back of a sheep and leaving an open wound for a couple of weeks, people living in the city and overseas who receive our product are finding that disturbing.'

Blackman works with industry group Australian Wool Innovation (AWI), which is committed to phasing out by 2010 mulesing, which surgically removes strips of wrinkled skin from the breech of a sheep to remove the urine-soaked wool favoured by blowflies' eggs. Tth skin grows back wool-free.

In Australia, the largest producer and exporter of wool, around a quarter of sheep farmers have given up mulesing already. Around 10 per cent of the annual wool clip comes from sheep that haven't been mulesed.

The ultimate solution is breeding sheep that aren't susceptible to flystrike because they have bare bottoms. In the meantime, farmers are using clips and injections and other interim measures to meet the target.

US-based animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has campaigned against mulesing. Hugo Boss AG, Germany's largest clothing maker, is the latest to answer PETA's call to stop buying wool from mulesed sheep.

'We have made the decision to concentrate our purchasing on mulesing-free wool because we want to set a clear example,' the Metzingen-based company said in a statement.

PETA has portrayed Australian farmers as reluctant converts and has warned that the 2010 deadline won't be met unless extra pressure is brought to bear.

Some farmers argue that mulesing is still the best method of saving sheep from flystrike and that it was a mistake to agree a moratorium before enough bare-breeched sheep had been bred.

Phillip Malone, a sheep farmer in Gulargambone near Dubbo, has to treat 1,500 lambs a year and only has himself and a farm labourer to do the work.

'People are prepared to change, but there's no better method as yet,' he said.

Gunther Beier, the chief executive of German wool dealer Bremer Woll-Kämmerei AG and the current president of the International Wool and Textile Association (IWTO) was in Australia recently to hammer home the importance of meeting the target and the advantage of legislating to enforce the use of pain relief in the interim.

'I think that would go a long way towards resolving the concerns of the European buyers, particularly the Scandinavian countries, who have been at the forefront of this particular problem,' Beier said. 'We now have to put out differences aside for the very sake of this fibre, particularly given we have so many opportunities beyond mulesing.'

The Australian government is averse to legislation and is not prepared to bring forward the 2010 deadline.

Sheep farmer Ben Duxson stopped mulesing his 5,500 sheep three years ago. 'To us, the issue is dead and buried because we know there's an industry out there that can survive without mulesing,' he said. 'It's hard because the industry has been so reliant on mulesing for so long, but we just have to get on the front foot and supply what they demand over there.'

Others are not so compliant.

Don Hamblin, leader of a wool growers' lobby group, warns that PETA's campaign won't stop when mulesing stops. 'Anyone who has followed the mulesing debate, or who has had any experience with PETA, would realize that you can't negotiate or cooperate with the group as their only aim is to put farmers out of business,' he said.