AUSTRALIA’S sheep meat industry was “very exposed” on the issue of mulesing, Meat & Livestock Australia managing director Richard Norton told lamb and wool producers in Bendigo this week.

At the 2017 BestWool BestLamb Conference in Bendigo on Wednesday, when asked if there would be an effect from mulesing on the red meat industry, Mr Norton said he would qualify his statement within the context of “MLA being responsible for marketing your product ‘in market’”.

About 400 sheep meat and wool producers attended the 10^th annual conference in Bendigo on Wednesday.

“We’ve all seen the pictures of a lamb sitting in a cradle that’s just been freshly mulesed,” Mr Norton said.

“I, through the Sheepmeat Council of Australia, employed an antagonist that would attack the red meat industry and the lamb industry.

“The first slide he put up was a lamb in a cradle that had just been mulesed,” he said.

“The second slide he put up was of five lambs standing in a corner that had just been mulesed.

“I don’t think you have to be a genius to work out how the antagonist against people eating animals, against eating red meat and trying to attack from the vegan point of view…. what those images would do in your markets – not my markets, your markets,” Mr Norton said.

“And then we had the data around how many of those animals were given pain relief when that surgical procedure was done.”

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Challenge for industry is to understand the risk

Mr Norton said he didn’t want to get into an argument about whether it is right or wrong to mules sheep.

“I come at it from the point of view that I’m responsible for marketing your product whether it be domestically or globally.

“The challenge for you as an industry is (to) understand that you are very exposed at this point in time around that issue.”

After the conference, Mr Norton told Sheep Central the practice of mulesing is hard to defend to the global consumer.

“The question is, if global retailers saw the images of mulesed sheep would they stop buying Australian red meat? And the answer is yes.”

Mr Norton reiterated that the initial question was broad and he answered it in the context of MLA being a marketer of sheep meat products.

“One of the great exposures for me marketing red meat in America and across Europe is the antagonists taking on mulesing and showing images of mulesed sheep.

“That would be offensive to people consuming our red meat and our good lamb,” he said.

“To me, it is a sleeper issue.”

Many Australian prime lamb dams are mulesed first cross, composite or Merino ewes, and unmulesed ewes generally sell at a discount in saleyards, due to the risk of flystrike.

“The Australian lamb industry should be concerned by that – it is a concern,” Mr Norton said, and it needed to consider producing lambs from an unmulesed base in the future.

“We all know from the research and the data around what consumers thinks and consumers want to know.

“They want to know that the animal has been treated ethically, so one doesn’t have to be particularly intelligent around people seeing those sort of images and thinking whether or not an animal has been treated ethically in the production process,” Mr Norton said.

“So the issue of mulesing is a sleeper for the red meat industry and one that would have a major impact on our consumers if, like the mulesing debate around wool in 2005, a similar campaign was run around mulesing.”

Is the solution genetics, pain relief or consumer understanding?

Pigeon Ponds prime lamb producer and west Victorian regional chairman for the Southern Australia Meat Research Council, Tim Leeming, said he had not mulesed a sheep in his Paradoo Prime self-replacing maternal composite flock since 1995.

Mr Leeming said urban consumers did not differentiate between the wool and sheep meat industries. He believed Merino wool producers continuing to mules represented as much a threat to the sheep meat industry as lamb producers with mulesed ewes.

“If you were to look at the sheep meat industry as a whole, mulesing and lamb survival out of Merinos, are the biggest threats, without a shadow of a doubt.

“That’s not being discriminatory, because there are still a number of prime lamb mothers that are being mulesed unnecessarily and is also some ordinary lamb survival in the prime lamb industry,” he said.

“If we were to look at where the big threats are, a lot of it points toward the Merino, that’s where the work has got to be done,” he said.

“We know there are some leading Merino breeders in the country who ceased mulesing years ago and others who have put fat and muscle into their sheep and improve lamb survival.

“It can only be done by genetics.”

Mr Leeming said the wool industry’s “knee-jerk” reaction to animal activist action and ultimatums against mulesing had been to try to treat the problem or its cause with “band-aid” solutions.

“Clips, anaesthetic, what else do you want to throw at it?

“We can spend billions of dollars on bull…. and not address the real issue.”

Mr Leeming said he could not see why there would not be a backlash against Australian sheep meat over mulesing in a similar way to how the issue has affected wool marketing.

Harrow wool producer and Sheepmeat Council of Australia board member Michael Craig has not mulesed Merino lambs since 2007, using breech scoring and electronic identification to autodraft and correctively join ewes to develop a flock that did not require mulesing.

“We could not have ceased mulesing if we didn’t have EID.”

But Mr Craig said the genetic solution to mulesing could not be “generalised” across the industry. He said the SCA is discussing anything that could be a risk to the industry.

“We’ve all heard the arguments why the Australian industry needs to do it (mules); we don’t have any alternatives, it actually is about animal welfare and managing risk (flystrike) in certain businesses and environments.”

Mr Craig said the industry should be thinking about how mulesing is perceived by consumers, how it managed the risk and proved it does care for its animals.

“And the real issue is how do we show that we really care for our animals and that puts the debate more around pain relief than mulesing itself.

“Those are the kinds of discussions around the sheepmeat council table that we do have,” he said.

“It’s not just mulesing, we’ve got to think about the whole welfare of the animal; all the things we do and not be ‘knee-jerk’ (in our reactions).

“There are reasons why we have to do things, but we’ve got to mitigate risk about what things say to consumers,” Mr Craig said.

“I personally think that a lot of our discussions in the future should be about pain relief and risk mitigation strategies.”

Mr Craig said he personally appreciated how “fantastic” mulesing was for flystrike prevention, but he could also see the consumer position.

‘They don’t know anything about pain relief’

Leading global wool industry analyst Chris Wilcox told BestWool BestLamb conference delegates he found at the recent International Wool Textile Organisation Congress in the United Kingdom that “mulesing is clearly a negative”.

“And when I talk to mills around the world, even in China, they say they are getting increasing demand for wool from sheep that are non-mulesed.

“They don’t know anything about pain relief, they want non-mulesed; the retailers and the brand they want non-mulesed wool.”

Mr Wilcox said the production of non-mulesed wool had increased to about nine percent of the Australian clip. Mills were turning to South Africa, Argentina and New Zealand for non-mulesed wool supplies, but he said only 6pc of New Zealand’s wool is Merino and Australia produces 70pc of the world’s Merino wool.

“Every time I go to China they are talking about it, not for the Chinese domestic market, but for the export market, and about half the wool that goes to China is re-exported to the United States and European Union.”

JBS Australia supply chain manager Mark Inglis refused to answer questions on the impact of mulesing in overseas markets.

Australia’s Sheep Industry Strategic Plan 2020 has an imperative for “Continuous improvement of sheep health and wellbeing”. The key activity under this imperative is to “Monitor and actively respond to community perceptions and concerns about sheep industry practices across the entire supply chain”. The plan lists MLA, SCA and the Australian Livestock Exporters’ Council as sharing the responsibility for implementing this key activity.

Sheepmeat Council of Australia’s senior executives are in Europe, but Sheep Central is seeking SCA comment on the risk mulesing poses to Australia’s sheep meat industry.