Australia, Stop Subjecting Lambs to Painful "Mulesing"

  • by: Care2.com
  • recipient: Agriculture Minister Joel Fitzgibbon
Farmers are cutting large chunks of skin away from their lambs' tails in a process called mulesing: one that leaves gaping wounds as breeding grounds for potential infection.

Mulesing is engineered to prevent an outbreak of flystrike, an infectious disease that starts in folds of skin and kills thousands of lambs a year. But by leaving open fissures in the animals' bodies, their risk of contracting flystrike could actually increase for several weeks after the procedure.

Farmers with no background in technical or surgical precision are allowed free rein to cut their sheep, and viable alternatives are constantly ignored. Lambs younger than twelve months old are not even legally required to be anesthetized.

Animal rights activists are rising to protest, and they need your support to send this medieval practice back to the dark ages.

Tell the government we need a new standard of animal welfare when it comes to lamb mulesing.
Lamb mulesing is an avoidable shortcoming of Big Agriculture. Australian Wool Innovation Limited (AWIL) has nominated flystrike management as its “top research and development priority,” as thousands of lambs are lost to infection a year.

Your government supports efforts to reduce reliance on mulesing without encouraging practices that are known to bypass the maiming altogether: plan-bodied sheep breeding. Concerted effort to breed plain-bodied sheep means lambs will no longer need mulesing within five years, according to industry leaders.

But breeding plainer-bodied sheep costs more, because they produce less wool. This is no longer an acceptable excuse.

[Your Comments Here]

Mulesing has been practiced for too long by untrained hands; the apathy must end. By leaving gaping fissures in the animals' bodies, their risk of contracting flystrike actually increases for several weeks after the procedure. It's time to come out of the Dark Ages.

Thanks,
[Your Name Here]
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