Rural Affairs
Issue No. 20 - December/January 2005
SAFF to defend wool export markets after landmark animal welfare step
A national decision to end the controversial practice of ‘mulesing’ — surgically removing skin folds on a sheep’s hindquarters to prevent flystrike — has alarmed some SA pastoralists.
Lobby group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has threatened an international campaign to boycott Australian wool products on the grounds that the surgery, performed without anaesthetic, is inhumane.
PETA argues that Merino sheep, whose skin folds make mulesing necessary, are fundamentally unsuited to Australia’s persistently hot climate and should not be bred here.
The radical group has succeeded in accelerating a reform process well underway, but the SA Farmers Federation will attempt to explain that process to PETA and manage the evolution away from mulesing, a decades-old practice.
Wool growers fear both stock losses flowing from a ban on the practice and the long-term international consequences of being targetted by an animal rights campaign.
SAFF’s Livestock Executive Committee Chairman Ben Mumford said some sectors of the wool producing community had expressed concern that they had been “sold out” by the national industry agreement on 9 November to phase out surgical mulesing by 2010 in favour of a less invasive alternative.
“Some people are saying the industry has surrendered to the demands of an extremist protest group,” Ben says.
“Nothing could be further form the truth. The industry has been...
