They eat grasses and other low-growing vegetation and ruminate (chew the cud). Let's take a look at what sheep need to stay happy and healthy. To work out how farmers can best meet the needs of sheep and ensure their welfare, it's helpful to understand the natural behaviour of sheep. Tail-docking is par for the course on commercial wool operations worldwide and involves cutting through the tail bone of a lamb with a hot knife or placing a rubber band around the tail to cut off circulation to the area so that it withers and falls off.We're working in a number of different ways to try to improve the lives of as many sheep as possible. While mulesing is probably the most well known of the mutilations inflicted on lambs used for wool, it certainly isn’t the only one. The fashion industry is trying to develop a traceability system called the Responsible Wool Standard to source non-mulesed wool but has noted the “little quantity available and no workable prices” as well as “quality concerns due to change of source origin”. That means only 10.2% of wool on the market can be sold to the large and growing list of retailers that want to declare that they source only non-mulesed wool. Of that, 30,732,306 kilograms came from sheep who were not mulesed. Since most farmers there are still practicing mulesing, the numbers just don’t add up.Īccording to AWI, Australia produced around 300,000,000 kilograms of greasy wool in the 2018–19 financial year. However, Australia remains the world’s largest wool producer, accounting for 90% of the world’s fine apparel wool and 60% of its apparel wool. There are now 185 fashion brands, including HUGO BOSS, H&M, Country Road Group, Kmart Group, and Patagonia, that have banned or plan to ban mulesed wool. Now, more than a decade past the deadline, at least 74% of Australian wool still comes from mulesed sheep.ĭuring a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry in 2020 with a proposal to ban mulesing, wool-industry stakeholders claimed that introducing a ban in January 2022 would “ not provide enough time” to phase it out. The tactic didn’t work, and a settlement was reached in which the wool industry promised to phase out mulesing by 2010. Most of the world had no idea what mulesing was until Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA, visited Australia in 2005 and was invited to a sheep farm to witness the procedure, escorted by a television crew from 60 Minutes.Īfter seeing the cruelty of mulesing, fabric buyers and fashion brands vowed not to purchase Australian wool, which caused the lobby group Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) to begin legal proceedings to “ wear PETA into the ground financially”. Since this is applied after the lamb’s flesh has already been painfully cut, it’s hardly a solution to the suffering caused by the practice. In recent years, farmers have more frequently provided lambs with pain relief such as Tri-Solfen, a topical anaesthetic and antiseptic gel spray for use after mulesing. Sheep are remarkably good at recognising human faces, and lambs may actively avoid the person who mulesed them for up to five weeks. Researchers have noted elevated cortisol levels and behavioural indicators of pain after mulesing, such as a lowered head with the nose almost touching the ground, sudden bolting, and an unusually stiff walk. It’s so intense that lambs can go into a state of shock, become sick, and lose weight – and some even die. The pain caused by mulesing can last up to three days.
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