As Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress this morning, PETA members stood outside the Capitol with posters showing lambs who were victims of Australia's cruel mulesing mutilation.

Mulesing involves forcing lambs onto their backs and restraining them with metal bars. Large chunks of the animals' skin and flesh are either carved off or clamped with vise-like grips until the skin and flesh die and fall off. Both procedures are very painful, and sheep are rarely given adequate pain relief. Mulesing is a crude attempt to prevent flies from laying eggs in the folds of sheep's skin, but flystrike can be controlled in more effective and humane ways, as some Australian sheep farmers are already doing.

You can help end this mutilation by urging the Australian prime minister to push for all farmers to adopt humane methods of flystrike prevention.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

If you haven't been keeping up with world events, you may be surprised to learn that change has come to the land down under. Julia Gillard recently made history by becoming Australia's first female prime minister. Now PETA is asking this precedent-setting PM to implement another big change: Help end the barbaric mulesing mutilation that's needlessly inflicted on millions of lambs every year.

PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk has dashed off a letter to Gillard asking her to spearhead government action on this issue.

Says Ingrid: "Carving hunks of flesh from lambs' rumps is a crude way to attempt (often unsuccessfully) to prevent flystrike. I have seen dead mulesed sheep with my own eyes, and everyone knows that there are humane options that should replace this barbaric act."

Experts estimate that mulesing could be phased out in just two years if Australian wool farmers would simply stop breeding overly woolly merino sheep—whose wrinkly skin makes them more susceptible to flystrike—and switch to "bare-breech" sheep (i.e., ones with smooth bottoms) instead. So far, greedy sheep farmers have refused to make the switch, so it's up to us to push hard—and we are doing just that with our campaign to get retailers and consumers around the world to reject merino wool.

If you've contacted decision-makers about this issue before, please do so again. If you haven't, now's the time. We'd like everyone to please take a minute to congratulate Prime Minister Gillard and ask her to fast-track the transition away from mulesing.

Written by Paula Moore