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Prestigious retailers and fashion designers—including Abercrombie & Fitch, H&M, Hugo Boss, and dozens of other major retailers across Europe and the U.S.—have joined the movement to stop buying wool from lambs who have endured the mulesing mutilation. In addition, Australia's New South Wales Farmers Association has called for an immediate ban on mulesing, and the Western Australia Department of Agriculture has announced that its own research flocks will no longer be mulesed. Despite this overwhelming trend, the Australian wool industry continues to drag its feet on developing humane alternatives to the mulesing mutilation instead of allowing millions of lambs to be partially flayed alive every year in a cruel attempt to control flystrike.

Rather than focusing its efforts on good animal husbandry and long-term humane solutions like bare-breech breeding, the Australian wool industry wastes time and effort on cheap, cruel flystrike-control methods, like painful plastic mulesing "clips." These so-called alternatives are ineffective, inhumane, and unacceptable to retailers and consumers around the world. Each year, millions of sheep discarded by the Australian wool industry are crammed onto export ships to be sent to the Middle East. Sheep who survive the terrifying voyage are often dragged off trucks by their ears and legs, tied up, and beaten. Their throats are often cut while the animals are still conscious.

Please write to Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd right now and ask him to ban mulesing mutilations. Demand that only effective, humane alternatives be used instead, and urge him to put an end to the cruel live-export industry.

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