Mulesing on chopping block, pressure mounts to mandate

The latest National Wool Declaration (NWD) update, from the 2017-18 season, found that 12 per cent of the 78pc of Victorian woolgrowers’ bales that were declared were non-mulesed, while 36pc were from sheep that had been given pain relief.

Nationally, 12pc of 66pc that was declared was non-mulesed, 32pc from mulesing with pain relief, 3pc from farms where mulesing had ceased, 20pc mulesed, and 34pc non-declared.

And according to New England Wool southern region wool buyer Andrew Raeber, who buys for Italian mills Reda and Vitale Barberis Canonico, mulesing was one of the biggest threats to the Australian industry.

“Next to season, this is potentially the biggest threat to growers, so you’d want to get some tools under your belt to know what to do in case it’s going to be legislated or if the consumer doesn’t want it anymore,” Mr Raeber said.

“To ignore it is the most dangerous thing you could do for your business.”

He has seen a 5-6pc increase in demand for non-mulesed wool each year over the last six to seven years, and expects it to continue.

“A few years ago we started talking to our clients, the people that buy the fabric, and said it’s an issue for consumers, who are happy to pay more for a natural product but it has to be sustainably created,” he said.

He said he was not sure how the issue would play out, but had suspicions there could be drastic changes on the way.

“We’re starting to think there could be a time where we mightn’t be able to sell wool with mulesing, even with pain relief,” he said.

“Or maybe we will be able to but it will be at discounted rates or at different markets.”

Harrow woolgrower Michael Craig, Tuloona, ceased mulesing 10 years ago, and said while he understood mulesing was an important control tool for a lot of farmers, he thinks it was a practice that comes with a lot of risk to the industry.

But Mr Craig said he doesn’t believe it was the Victorian Government’s responsibility to intervene and mandate, but the wool industry’s time to show some leadership.

“Rather than governments regulating us, we would be far better off finding market mechanisms, such as SustainaWOOL, which give us validation to what we’re doing on farm,” he said.

“It’s those market signals that will incentivise us to find solutions to issues around mulesing.”

And the decision to stop mulesing came after a 12-month trial on his own sheep over 10 years ago, where he mulesed half of every mob, and weighed them at weaning.

“We found that there was a three-kilogram difference between mulesed and non-mulesed,” he said.

By breech scoring his sheep, and finding the right genetics, he discovered he was able to go ahead without mulesing.

“Ironically we learned that in our sheep, the more breech wrinkle they have, the poorer their fertility anyway, and that’s an incredible correlation, so if we want to improve our fertility, we should be getting rid of those types of sheep,” he said.

“So ceasing mulesing was a win-win.”

He said the key to making it work was moving away from thinking about a mob of sheep to thinking about individual animal management.

“We need to have a mechanism to link each individual animal to their breech wrinkle,” he said.

“The problem with mulesing is once you take the skin off, it’s gone, you can’t score it, you need something like electronic identification to link it all together.”

But he said mandatory pain relief was a “no-brainer”.

“How can we say we are mulesing because we care for them and want to prevent fly strike, yet we won’t put pain relief on?” he said.

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