America’s apparel brands and retailers are holding their ground on insisting Australia’s wool industry adopt mulesing alternatives by 2013.
Mulesing is a crude surgical procedure used to remove the skin around a sheep's anus to prevent flystrike, a potentially fatal insect infestation.
Animal rights groups have criticized it as inhumane and pressured western retailers and brands to use non-mulesed wool. Australian farmers counter that the procedure saves as many as three million sheep a year from dying a slow, agonizing death from flystrike. Less than 10% of Australian wool is non-museled, according to some estimates.
In a Feb. 24 letter addressed to a leading consultant to the Australian Wool Industries Secretariat, six major U.S. trade groups praised the industry’s efforts to document and verify the source of non-mulesed wool and increase the use of analgesics to comfort sheep undergoing the crude surgical process, but said farmers needed to take both initiatives further faster and chastised the industry for not addressing its 2013 timeframe for adopting mulesing alternatives.
The letter is signed by the American Apparel and Footwear Association, the Outdoor Industry Association, the National Retail Federation, the Retail Leaders Association, the US Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel and the Wool Working Group.
The mulesing debate, fueled by gruesome pictures posted on the Internet by animal rights groups, has hurt Australia’s wool industry, particularly when it comes to exporting merino wool to Chinese factories serving eco-conscious outdoor apparel brands. Icebreaker, SmartWool and Ibex Outdoor Clothing, for instance, use non-mulesed merino wool from New Zealand, where a cooler climate lessens or eliminates the incidence of flystrike.
