Animal welfare groups push to call mulesing ‘live lamb cutting’

Animal welfare groups have rebranded mulesing as “live lamb cutting” in their latest bid to ban the practice.

Animal welfare groups are attempting to rebrand mulesing as “live lamb cutting”, in their latest bid to ban the practice.

Animal welfare organisation Four Paws is leading the charge and the group’s head of animal welfare in fashion Jessica Medcalf said transparent communication was essential to ensuring both consumers and voters were well-informed.

“By more accurately naming the practice, we believe it will increase awareness of this major issue and encourage people to make more conscientious shopping choices,” Ms Medcalf said.

The new term came about earlier this year when animal protection groups came together to discuss the shortfalls of the term mulesing, she said.

“The previous name failed to capture the true essence of the practice and the impact on the animals involved,” Ms Medcalf said.

She said the word mulesing did not describe what it did, was outdated and was “challenging to spell, pronounce and remember, which can impede understanding and hinder efforts for change”.

While the move is being led by Four Paws, the Australian Alliance for Animals policy and government relations director Dr Jed Goodfellow said his group would actively support the campaign.

WoolProducers Australia chief executive officer Jo Hall said the new term was a “loaded phrase aimed at grabbing attention by so called animal welfare experts”.

“It is no doubt being used to evoke strong negative emotions without providing context of why mulesing is undertaken,” Ms Hall said.

“While as an industry we might collectively roll our eyes and dismiss this campaign as another out-of-touch animal rights group who don’t know what they’re talking about, this is actually the last thing we can afford to do.”

Ms Hall said AAA was a strategic, unified, well organised group that understood how politics worked, which was “the opposite of the wool industry”.

She said the sheep industry needed to be more transparent in dealing with the broader community, as it too had tried to rebrand mulesing to breech modification, and had wanted to change the description of pain relief at mulesing to analgesic/anaesthetic, to keep the word pain away from the practice.

“Seriously anyone who tries to claim that mulesing doesn’t inflict pain is living in Disneyland,” Ms Hall said.

“When a number of pain relief products became commercially available, WoolProducers changed our policy to call for mandatory pain relief application for mulesing as a way to show our customers that we take animal welfare seriously while trying to retain the legal right to mules.”

Ms Hall said the sheep industry needed to be upfront and having mature conversations about mulesing, to show why is was conducted in the first place.

“It’s as simple as saying that mulesing is an effective once-for-life procedure that offers lifetime protection against breech flystrike,” she said.