Mar

Australian Wool Boycott Goes Global

posted at 1:56 PM
Permalink
Comments (3)

It seems that not only H&M are wising up to the cruelty of mulesing, a procedure used in Australia on lambs destined for wool. Sixteen other Swedish retailers are boycotting wool from mulesed sheep, joining other international clothing chains like American Eagle Outfitters, Abercrombie & Fitch, Timberland and more.

Today in a protest outside the Australian Embassy in Sweden, PETA and Animal Rights Sweden activists dressed up as a ‘farmer’, and a ‘lamb’ with a bloody rump, mimicking the nasty practice. These wonderful people braved the wind, rain and even snow to tell the public and media all about what goes on in Australia. Thanks to Stella and Linnéa for playing dress-up!

The protest and our campaign are intended to urge wool producers to eliminate this bloody practice, which causes millions of lambs to suffer - just for a woolly jumper. According to our bods here:

“Farmers use shears to cut chunks of skin and flesh from lambs’ backsides - without any painkillers - in a crude attempt to reduce maggot infestation, even though humane control methods exist. Countless forward-thinking farmers have already implemented practices such as regular crutching and jetting, the use of flytraps and good animal husbandry - all of which effectively prevent flystrike.”

Tags: H&M, sheep, wool

Post this story to:
StumbleUpon
Digg
Newsvine
del.icio.us
Hugg

3 users responded in this post

Subscribe to this post comment rss

posted by Tessan on March 20th, 2008 at 1:32 pm

Weeeh! Cool that you guys work with Animal Rights Sweden (”Djurens Rätt” in swedish). I am a proud member of Animal Rights Sweden, even if I now live in London. They rock! And so do you!

posted by Samantha Overy on March 21st, 2008 at 8:57 am

The mulesing backflip by these companies to allow the use of humanely mulesed sheep wool is totally unacceptable. These farmers have had plenty of time to implement the use of pain relief and have chosen not to use the more humane method. There is no guarantee the anaesthethic (and pain relief?) will be administered correctly if at all even though it may be at the location.At present only 17% of farmers are using pain relief immediately after the mulesing procedure. This does not in any way negate the cruelty of the procedure and defeats the purpose of the ban.There is no guarantee that the anaesthetic will be given enough time to work considering that these are people who have mulesed 10’s if not 100’s of 1000’s of sheep using the old method and are not going to be concerned with the sheep’s welfare only how long the job is going to take if ther profits will be reduced.This fact alone may go some way to ensuring the right thing is done but to me it is going to be most unlikely in many cases.Every time a step is made in a forward diection for animals and animal welfare someone steps in to stop the progress. My belief is that if you don’t do something willingly when you have the chance and you wait until you are forced to do it the right way then that is the end of if it and you don’t then get the chance to say okay I will do it the right way now that I have to and my profits are falling. Too bad too late. NOT good enough. I am quite incenced by this.

posted by rojo on March 23rd, 2008 at 5:44 am

sam, while there are no guarantees about the effectiveness of anaesthesia placement-isn’t it better that they try?

And if it works will mulesing be any different to any other type of surgery?

Better late than never!

Australian Wool Boycott Goes Global

3 users responded in this post

Post a Comment