Hello from Australia! I just joined the Big Brother house for a wild three days. It’s a top show here and everyone’s talking about it. Of course the topic of animal rights came up among the group on live television. I had an interesting conversation with one of the female house mates, a vet, about mulesing. Nobody outside of Australia knows what mulesing is ” and when you say it people think you are talking about breakfast cereal or singing donkeys. Actually, it’s a bizarre mutilation the wool trade does on millions of lambs each year ” only in Australia, and it is PETA’s main campaign focus here.
Because sheep in Australia have been bred for decades to have more skin ” and therefore more wool ” the skin has grown so dense around their backsides that they can’t even defecate properly, and when they do the mess attracts flies, which can kill the sheep. So, instead of using a breed with a smooth rear (like they do in New Zealand) the industry just hacks away the skin all around millions of lambs’ rear ends ” with no panikillers. PETA exposed this in a video hosted by Pink
http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/video.asp?video=wool_pink&Player=wm which helped convince huge companies like H&M, Liz Claiborne, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle and many more to demand farmers eliminate mulesing. About 20% of Australian sheep farmers have already done away with it. They use the adapted breeds, or monitor their flocks during the hottest times of the year and spraying and washing the animals properly. But the fat cats with the mega farms with tens of thousands of animals that the ranchers don’t want to spend money tending to, simply mutilate the lambs and ignore their responsibility as the animals’ caretakers. It’s cheap and dirty, and is one of those odd cruelties that simply must be stopped. There’s always a nicer way for these industries to treat animals, it just takes consumers to pressure them to make the effort.
Below is an excerpt about this issue from the Australian edition of Committed, the oddball memoir by my PETA pal Dan Mathews, who was actually sued in Australia for pressuring the big fashion houses to demand change.
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From Committed: A Rabble Rouser’s Memoir, by Dan Mathews, published by Simon & Schuster
The purpose of my trip to Sydney was to engage the Australian wool trade, both in court and over the airwaves, in a debate over a controversial mutilation they perform each year on millions of young Merino sheep. You’ve likely heard of Merino, the most widely used wool in the world, and might even have a sweater or socks made from it in your closet. I’ve had a few such sweaters over the years but never liked the fabric because it’s itchy, heavy, and smells like a dog when wet. Nevertheless, it’s a multibillion-dollar industry promoted globally by aggressive trade organizations.
Because Australia now produces a third of the world’s wool, some think of sheep as part of the country’s natural heritage, like kangaroos”but sheep are from Spain, which, for many centuries, was the world’s dominant wool supplier. Ironically, after bringing sheep to Australia, ranchers started shooting the native kangaroos who ventured onto grazing lands as a means of “pest control.’ Merino sheep are known for their thick wool, which served the animals well in Spain, where they roamed the southern plains by winter and the northern highlands by summer. It also befit them in the relatively cool climes of England,Ireland,Argentina, and New Zealand, where these sheep ended up as the industry spread in the 1800s. But in the much hotter year-round temperatures in Australia”particularly the southwestern region, which became Merino central by the 1900s”the animals sweltered. Shifting the Merino industry to Western Australia, where temperatures can soar to 50′ Celsius made about as much sense as opening puppy farms for hairless Chihuahuas in Siberia.
Making matters worse, the ranchers selectively bred the sheep through artificial insemination and embryo transfer so they would develop wrinklier skin, thereby producing more wool and a bigger profit. And boiling hot animals. The increasingly thick folds in their skin become moist and attract flies, which lay eggs in the wrinkles and create deadly maggot infestation, a condition the ranchers call “flystrike.’ Worse still, the thicker folds of flesh around the sheep’s backsides grew so dense they couldn’t even crap properly. Their dirty rear ends resulted in even worse flystrike.
Some farmers dealt with the problem by regularly cropping the wool around their flock’s tails. Some developed different breeds, including Merinos with bare skin around their rears, which reduces the problem. Others monitored their flocks closely during the few times a year the animals are most prone to flystrike, and cleaned the animals thoroughly using special treatments to prevent infection. But as the industry grew and became less about family farms and more about gigantic, unmanageable mega-herds, ranchers focused more on minimizing labor costs than they did on being “good shepherds.’ In 1801, Australia had just 34,000 sheep, a number which grew to 2 million by 1813, 72 million by 1901, and over 100 million today.
With the ever-increasing herd sizes and unnaturally wrinkly animals making flystrike a more difficult problem, a farmer named John Mules came up with a crude method in the 1930s that caught on because it was so cheap. Mr. Mules simply used his gardening shears to hack away wide chunks of flesh around his animals’ anuses (and the vulvas of the ewes). The painful mutilation is banned in England, but in Australia the practice”called “mulesing’”became standard, resulting in millions of lambs being pinned into a metal brace each year and sliced up without anesthesia.
A special painkiller was eventually developed but almost nobody used it because it was deemed an unnecessary expense. Also, it was soon discovered that the bloody wound exposed the animals to other painful ailments, particularly the organism that causes arthritis, which mulesed animals are seven times likelier to develop. But as arthritis doesn’t affect wool output, the induced affliction isn’t given any consideration. This may sound shocking, but it’s reflective of what any industry that uses animals does: look for shortcuts that will increase profits, regardless of the suffering involved.
Another alarming venture sheep farmers developed is the live export trade. This involves mostly older sheep. After years of being shorn by rough handlers paid by quota, a system which leaves many animals with shearing wounds that are seared closed with hot tar, they are shipped abroad for slaughter. The sheep are crammed by the tens of thousands onto multitiered barges bound for the Middle East and North Africa. Because they are packed so tightly, many can’t reach food and die of starvation. Others get trampled or die from untreated wounds or disease. Sickly animals are either tossed alive into the swirling steel blades of what looks a giant Cuisinart or thrown into the open sea, where they drown or are eaten by sharks. Those who survive the month-long ordeal are dragged from the boat and sold to be sacrificed in violent religious rituals or to filthy slaughterhouses that abide by no humane standards, where they are hacked to death or have their heads cut off with dull blades.
People commonly assume that there can’t be as much cruelty in the wool trade as there is in the fur trade. After all, the animals aren’t skinned; they just get a haircut. Once upon a time that may have been true, but nowadays it’s not so simple.
As early as the 1940s, concern about the suffering caused by mulesing was expressed by both farmers and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. But, perhaps because sheep ranchers got themselves onto the RSPCA’s board, nothing changed. In the 1970s, Australian philosopher Peter Singer”who wrote the bible of the animal rights movement, Animal Liberation”condemned it but was told to mind his own business. In 1985 a Senate subcommittee launched an inquiry into the practice. In the 1990s, activists Patty Mark and Mark Pearson, with the Animal Liberation organization, bravely filmed the gut-wrenching practice, which sensitized more people to the problem but didn’t cause the industry to budge. Then, in 2003, the Australian groups asked PETA to get involved and make the issue a worldwide concern by bringing high-profile wool-using fashion lines into the debate, as we had done with the fur issue.
At first, we explored the idea of urging companies to buy only non-mulesed wool from Australia to support the handful of more ethical farmers and to give consumers a choice, rather than push for a blanket boycott. But the industry refused to separate the two types of wool, fearful that giving consumers a choice might endanger their cheap method in the way that free-range eggs have cut into sales of eggs produced by hens confined in battery cages. Soon, it became clear that the only way forward was to pursue a total boycott of Australian wool until ranchers stopped mulesing lambs.