Punish shearers guilty of terrible cruelty to sheep

According to PETA and the RSPCA, sheep shearers in the UK working for the wool industry have been secretly filmed abusing the animals in their charge.

During shearing, sheep were shown to be:

• Punched
• Beaten
• Stamped on
• Cut with shearing equipment
• Sewn up roughly with needles but no pain relief
• Held down with booted feet
• Slammed into a wooden floor by the head
• Thrown off lorries to the ground
• Left without veterinary care when painfully lame

Video of this abuse can be seen here.

The UK has more than 40,000 wool-producing farms, with 15 million sheep between them, and most UK farms employ special contractors for shearing, whose employees are paid for each sheep shorn – creating an incentive to work quickly.

However working quickly is no excuse for systematic animal cruelty.

Please sign this petition so that the RSPCA will take action, identifying the perpetrators of this abuse, and punishing them for animal cruelty which is crime under UK law.