Tuesday, 31 October 2023

Mulesing

Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (17:17): (543) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Agriculture, and the action I seek is for her to ensure that mulesing is prohibited under the new animal care and protection laws. In 2020, thanks to the work of the former Animal Justice Party member in this place, it became mandatory for those mulesing young lambs in Victoria to use pain relief. Mulesing is an incredibly painful mutilation procedure in which the skin around the rear of the lamb is sliced off with sharp shears. Mulesing was designed to address a human-made problem in which sheep are selectively bred to have excess skin and therefore more wool. It makes them prone to flystrike, a painful and sometimes fatal condition caused by maggots hatching inside the extra skin folds of sheep and eating their flesh.

Mulesing is the industry’s quick fix, and it is not always an effective form of prevention, especially since the problem persists in folds of skin elsewhere, such as around the neck and under the legs. Scientific research confirms that the best solution to flystrike is to stop breeding sheep with wrinkles, instead raising plain-bodied sheep who do not have these folds of skins to begin with. This is an economically possible and ethically vital transition to be made here in Victoria, yet the much crueller option of mulesing widely persists.

In Victoria there is a fundamental flaw in the most common legally required form of pain relief. Trisolfen is only applied after sheep have had their skin cut off in chunks while they are totally conscious and are able to feel every moment. Some farmers may use an additional form of pain relief, Meloxicam, applied before the procedure, but this can take up to 2 hours to take full effect and farmers have been observed waiting mere seconds before cutting into young lambs, rendering the pain relief useless.

Victorian organisation Collective Fashion Justice recently obtained new footage of mulesing in this state. It shows what this so-called best practice form of mulesing, using two types of pain relief, actually looks like. Lambs are seen writhing in extreme pain and crying out, slowly limping after being horrifically injured and then thrown to the ground. Lambs are of course sentient, feeling animals, the same as our beloved dogs and cats. Many farmers will admit to despising this cruel practice even if they have administered more pain relief than legally required. An experienced vet reviewed this abhorrent footage. They confirmed that the two treatments combined give partial but not complete pain relief and that an additional dose of either of those medications does not guarantee any relief at all. Once you have seen the pain endured by these animals with your own eyes the right decision is clear, and I hope that the minister will side with the animal welfare science and with kindness and end mulesing here in Victoria. It is the very least that we can do for lambs and sheep.