To correct the imbalance between consumer perception about animal welfare practices and the reality of on-farm livestock management, WoolProducers Australia (WPA) president Ed Storey said recent opinion articles published by ACM mastheads highlights the difficulty Australian wool growers are experiencing in getting their message accepted.
Mr Storey, a wool grower from Yass pointed to the opinion piece by Josh Lamb from Endeavour Wool Exports and current President of the Australian Council of Wool Exporters and Processors (ACWEP), who commented on animal welfare in the wool industry and how we are perceived by our customers.
Mr Storey also drew attention to the comments from Tim Marwedel, managing director of The Schneider Group who made presentation to a recent webinar hosted by Pooginook Merinos and who was similarly concerned about consumers perceptions.
Mr Storey said each felt our industry's story had not been told effectively.
"For a number of years this could be the case," he said.
"However, WoolProducers Australia has shown considerable leadership and collaboration over the past 18 months to try to address this by developing and launching the Trust in Australian Wool campaign (TIAW)."
Mr Storey said the campaign is about the robust, world leading animal health and welfare systems that exist in Australia, coupled with sustainability, biosecurity and traceability frameworks that are already in place.
"The TIAW campaign brought all those components together to try to be more effective in telling our story," he said.
"It was great to have Josh and ACWEP as part of our TIAW launch in March of this year."
WPA has oversight of programmes that growers invest in (often in partnership with our state and federal governments) to prevent exotic disease incursions, to manage endemic diseases, to get early detection of conditions through abattoir monitoring and then provide tools for producers to address these issues.
Mr Storey pointed out WPA is continually preparing our industry for an EAD outbreak that we hope never comes, through industry training and other preparedness activities.
"The industry R and D and marketing companies, AWI and MLA, do research and development to continually improve health and welfare such as Lifetime Ewe Management and investing in the development of Buccalgesic paste and Numnuts," he said.
"TIAW also collated many of the systems that underpin the standards and quality of our wool to give buyers confidence to bid, such as those run by AWEX and AWTA.
"We articulated that there are state based POCTA laws that producers are subject to."
Woolgrowers are already aware of those management processes and many others are what producers do every day on their farms, be it worm monitoring, blood testing or pre-emptively vaccinating to prevent disease impacting on their health and welfare.
"Many of the programmes mentioned above are run by Animal Health Australia," Mr Storey said.
"WPA are the wool industry members of this body which is a partnership of industry and state and federal governments.
"We provide oversight and strategic direction on many of the programmes and this leadership provides real value for the industry in enhancing market access, driving policies to reduce disease risk and improve health and welfare of the national flock over time."
Mr Storey said all are great health and welfare outcomes for our flock and we are telling our customers about the manner in which sheep in Australia are cared for..
"One thing Josh Lamb did highlight was his thought that 'pain relief be mandatory for some animal husbandry tasks'," Mr Storey said.
"WPA thinks he is 100 percent correct and in 2018 WPA endorsed policy to have mandatory pain relief for mulesing.
"We strongly support this still, but the debate is moving on. In some countries castration and tail docking are coming under pressure from animal rights groups."
In Australia, increasing use of pain relief for these procedures in the form of Metacam 20, Buccalgesic, Numnuts as well as the well-known Tri-solfen is occurring on sheep producing properties.
However, Mr Storey posed the question - What do we as an industry want to do about this lack of consumer understanding?
"We were alerted to this issue by the AWI European office during the Wool 2030 development and by various groups on the excellent Schneider Wool Connect virtual conference in October 2020," he said.
"Given Australian producers are well versed in using anaesthetic and analgesia (AA) products at lamb marking, it presents as a real opportunity to be proactive on this issue.
"Hoping it will go away and saying nothing is not a strategy."
Mr Storey said the industry should determine its own future and not wait for others to determine it for us."
"Professor Bruce Allworth made this point in his informative presentation to the recent MerinoLink conference in Wagga saying that the market will be the first to set the direction and industry need to be aware of where this is heading," he said..
WPA's Health and Welfare Advisory Committee is considering these and many other issues at the moment, as another example of us providing leadership in this area, according to Mr Storey.
"We have coordinated, in addition to our SFO and Independent Directors, representatives from ASWGA, AWGA and the Australian Sheep Vets Association (providing technical advice) to take a collaborative, consensus building approach to these key policy areas," he said.
"We have recently invited some further relevant partici'spants and hope they join us for our next meeting."
Mr Storey pointed to comments made by Josh Lamb who believed we must reduce our reliance on mulesing to control fly strike.
"We know certain markets do not want mulesed wool," he said.
"Bodies such as AWI need to be as transparent about international market signals to allow individual growers to make informed decisions about their business, and on this matter there is good news to tell when AWEX's NWD statistics tell a story of an increasing percentage of the clip is declared non-mulesed."
Mr Storey said the statistics are high and increasing, which is good news under a voluntary scheme, and that it clearly demonstrates what we already know that producers care for their animals.
"As I advised the Wool Connect conference in October, when asked about increasing non-mulesed wool from Australia, I said the first priority is the welfare of the sheep, as we have a significant fly strike risk in Australia not faced by many other wool growing nations, and then in the long run the market will determine the future," he said.
"WPA are also providing this leadership in other places such as the world first Sheep Sustainability Framework, developed with Sheep Producers Australia with strong technical and financial support from AWI an MLA.
"It shows what can be done."
And Mr Storey was quick to take issue with Josh Lamb's comment that "we have to deliver a clear and transparent story that Australia is leading on the animal welfare front".
"WPA is doing that," he said.
"TIAW is a platform from which we can (and already have in recent weeks with overseas markets) continue to tell this world leading story.
"But we, as an industry need to be better at it."
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