Since Wayne Pacelle & Ingrid Newkirk want extinction of domesticated animals they would gladly allow Fly strike to become epidemic in sheep herds. These ARA fanatics relish the opportunity to ignore the benefits of museling sheep to prevent the more cruel attacks from diseases associated with Fly Strike and blow flies. Anybody thinking HSUS & PETA are about protecting animals from cruel deaths is sillier then a possum on LSD.


The Age (AUS)
Unravelling our wool crisis
By Lorna Edwards
March 15, 2008

http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/u...ge#contentSwap2

Australia's $2.7 billion wool export industry has faced condemnation
and boycotts from Europe over the controversial practice of mulesing
sheep. And there are signs the problems will only get worse.

Last week at the glitzy L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival design
awards, Sydney designer Ben Pollitt triumphantly declared: "I wear
wool, I design with wool and I look forward to taking it to the
world." Since then our golden fleece has come to look somewhat
tarnished. The European fashion retailers who once flocked for our
fabric began cancelling orders as consumer boycott calls over the
controversial farm practice of mulesing gained resonance.

Gory images of the bloodied behinds of lambs appeared in the European
media, and Australia was condemned as a nation of "lamb mutilators",
plunging our fourth-largest agricultural export industry into crisis.
Aussie merino wool rapidly descended into a fashion faux pas.

Mulesing is now a dirty word in global textile markets. It refers to
the slicing of a patch of skin from the rear of Australian merino
sheep to prevent flystrike. Often done without anaesthetic - due to
reasons such as cost and previous unavailability - the procedure is
aimed at removing permanently the wrinkly skin that otherwise becomes
a moist haven for blowflies to lay eggs.

Most in Australia recognise the unsavoury fact that without some form
of mulesing, many sheep will die a painful death as maggots hatch and
burrow into their tissue, resulting in blood poisoning. But the
Europeans are not buying that the end justifies the means.

Protests in Sweden last month had a snowball effect across
Scandinavia, with Sweden and Norway's agriculture ministers condemning
mulesing. A bribery scandal erupted in Sweden after an Australian wool
industry lobbyist was filmed offering a trip to Australia to a
mulesing critic. In Denmark, even Princess Mary was targeted for
championing Australian wool.

This is not the first crisis for the wool industry over mulesing. In
2004, American retailers threatened to abandon our wool as powerful
animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
mounted a fierce campaign and recruited celebrities to condemn the
industry.

The wool industry managed to broker a truce and buy some time. It
committed to phasing out the practice by 2010 if PETA backed off
pressuring retailers. But as that deadline draws near and concerns
grow among some in the industry and animal welfare groups that it can
be met, the gloves are off again and our $2.7 billion industry faces a
new fight for its survival.

Industry insiders now fear the Nordic countries will take their fight
to Brussels and push for a ban on wool from mulesed sheep at the
European Commission, and that the previously placated American market
will follow suit.

The escalating crisis has led to panic and recriminations within the
wool industry in Australia over the past week. Some have sought the
scalp of former minister Ian McLachlan, who heads Australian Wool
Innovation, the research organisation charged with finding mulesing
alternatives, and marketing. Some woolgrowers believe it has failed
them in both endeavours, for which they pay a compulsory 2% levy to
fund its activities.

One of the loudest critics is the head of breakaway woolgrowers group
the Australian Wool Growers Association, Martin Oppenheimer. He
believes AWI failed to recognise a global movement towards ethical
consumerism, and antagonised animal rights activists and the media
through legal threats. He accuses it of sullying the industry's
reputation by offering inducements to some who speak against it,
through the Australian Sheep and Wool Industry Taskforce. Both the
taskforce and AWI vigorously deny that offering trips to overseas
opponents to see our industry first-hand constitutes unethical
behaviour. Nevertheless, taskforce consultant Kevin Craig, at the
centre of the Swedish scandal, was removed from his duties for
inappropriately making a trip offer to a campaigner conditional on her
not appearing on a TV program criticising mulesing.

Oppenheimer agrees the industry is not ready to phase out surgical
mulesing immediately, but says the AWI and taskforce should be pushing
the use of pain relief in the interim and promoting it to appease the
markets. "They want clean and green and ethically produced and they
have every right to want that, and attacking media or animal welfare
activists doesn't help as we have to listen to what they are saying
and also get our side across."

Internal bickering has continued over the pace of development of
mulesing alternatives. One NSW woolgrower said many farmers were tired
of the squabbling. "You've got three types of people out there: you've
got the extreme activist, the redneck cocky and the people in
between," he says. "With the extreme fringe, whether it's growers or
activists, I don't think you'll ever please them."

AWI has spent millions investigating different technologies. Its hopes
rest on plastic clips that are applied to sheep rears, which
eventually cause the skin to wither and fall off, similar to the
process used in castration.

But trials have yielded mixed results and some woolgrowers and animal
welfare groups are concerned about the pain caused by this method and
the environmental implications of paddocks filled with discarded
plastic clips. Nevertheless, the AWI says it is confident it will have
alternatives ready for the 2010 deadline.

Some farmers have already moved towards genetic selection to breed
merinos with a naturally bare breech, but this is considered the
long-term solution.

Another option under development is an injection that causes death of
skin in the breech area, leaving the skin underneath stretched. But
with the 2010 deadline fast approaching and the consumer backlash
mounting in the northern hemisphere, woolgrowers are increasingly
nervous about whether these options will be commercially viable and
available in time.

However, Europe's largest buyer of Australian wool, G. Modiano,
believes quibbling over meeting the deadline is no longer relevant as
the market reality is much more dire. "Forget 2010 - the 2010
agreement is now dead in the water," London-based director Laurence
Modiano says. "In the last 10 days, there have been more and more
customers jumping on the bandwagon demanding to know where their wool
has come from, and this has never been the case before."

MANY retailers no longer want to be associated with mulesed wool or
even Australian wool and Modiano believes it's only a matter of time
before the US follows suit. He warns that the Australian wool industry
is facing collapse if it doesn't immediately employ compulsory pain
relief with surgical mulesing and get the message across to retailers
through an urgent dash to Europe headed by Agriculture Minister Tony
Burke.

Throughout this week, Burke has reiterated that he has written to his
Swedish counterpart and has met farm groups and the RSPCA to discuss
the issue. But some within the industry say the new minister has not
done enough to avert the crisis, nor grasped its severity.

The local animal welfare lobby is unsympathetic. RSPCA president Dr
Hugh Wirth says that while he supports the need for some form of
mulesing, he believes industry leaders and government have brought the
crisis on themselves by ignoring animal welfare concerns for years.

"If Australia has to go through a crisis with their wool sales in
order to get something that they admit is cruel banned, well, that has
got my support," he says. "The truth that I have learnt being
president of the RSPCA since 1970 is that there is very little animal
welfare improvement in this country without it being dictated by a
crisis, like the Europeans are doing to us now."

A global trend towards ethical consumerism would be ignored by
Australia at its peril. The Australian Law Reform Commission predicts
animal rights could become "the next great social justice movement".
The commission says bans on Australian wool in Sweden illustrate how
Australian farm practices will face increasing scrutiny, with major
consequences for exporters.

"The remarkable recent growth of animal law courses in Australian
universities parallels a similar growth in environmental law courses a
generation ago and indicates that animal rights are now firmly on the
agenda," commission president Professor David Weisbrot says.

The RSPCA and Animals Australia say we already have a reputation as a
cruel nation overseas mostly due to our live export industry, which
this year is the target of a global campaign by a coalition of 900
animal welfare groups in 147 countries. They say that unlike in the
northern hemisphere, where ethical farming is taken seriously, animal
welfare concerns are routinely ignored by government and industry here
and those who raise them are dismissed as radical extremists.

But in the age of the internet, and video website YouTube in
particular, animal welfare groups have harnessed new powers of getting
footage of farm practices they consider cruel to a global audience
instantly.

"It has turned animal protection into a global movement, allowing
evidence to be conveyed between groups and mobilising consumer
activism in other countries," Animals Australia head Glenys Oogjes
says.

Groups warn that the wool crisis and live export campaign will be
followed by campaigns against cruelty within our dairy, poultry, egg
and pork industries.

Despite the grim outlook for wool this week, Modiano believes the
industry has a chance to turn the crisis around and then promote the
virtues of its "clean and green" product against synthetics. "The
mulesing issue has been hijacked but we have to resolve the animal
welfare side before we start marketing wool for all its positives," he
says. The industry must fast-track identifying non-mulesed wool in the
auction process and growers must immediately start using anaesthetic
for mulesing.

"For any grower who says it will cost too much money to apply an
analgesic, the alternative is that he is simply adding to the
destruction of the Australian wool industry, as there is an increasing
band of buyers around the world that simply will not buy wool from an
animal that hasn't been fairly treated."

With between 70% and 80% of the world's wool coming from Australia,
retailers were still waiting for our response to the crisis.

"If Australia doesn't respond, the consequences will play themselves
out in the next few months," Modiano says.




If the courts and public continue to allow ARA lies and mistruths to prevail all domesticated animals will become extinct by default.

good post, important topic.