flickr / CC

Next! The British fashion giant Next, that is. The mega-retailer has announced that because the nefarious Australian wool industry has reneged on its promise to ban the mulesing mutilation (which involves hacking hunks of flesh off lambs' backsides) by 2010, Next will now only "source wool from outside Australia or from Australian sources which guarantee that mulesing with shears or clips has ceased."

"Next believes that the continuation of mulesing beyond the 2010 deadline previously self-imposed by the Australian sheep industry is unacceptable," the company announced in a statement. Next joins other leading retailers and designers—including Abercrombie & Fitch, Timberland, H&M, American Eagle, Liz Claiborne, Hugo Boss, Perry Ellis International, Coldwater Creek, and many more—that have pledged not to use wool from mulesed lambs.

You can help stop this unnecessary mutilation by encouraging Talbots (one retailer that has failed to take action) to follow in Next's footsteps and stop purchasing Australian wool.

Written by Alisa Mullins

And that would be Australian Wool Innovation (AWI), which is (surprise, surprise) reneging on its promise to end mulesing by 2010.

AWI will have had six years to stop a horrific practice that no other country engages in. New Zealand stopped the mulesing mutilation years ago. If AWI does not meet the 2010 deadline, retailers around the world will take action by sourcing wool elsewhere.

AWI has only itself to blame for losing the world market by trying to delay the inevitable. Of course we were spot-on: AWI has chosen not to live up to its word and is still stuck in the 1930s. Australian wool is no longer the standard—it is now a symbol of the way greedy people have behaved by treating thinking, feeling animals as if they were inanimate commodities.

Despite the fact that leading retailers across Europe and North America are refusing to purchase wool from mulesed lambs, the Australian wool industry's most recent ludicrous scheme is to adopt an equally cruel and painful procedure called "clip mulesing," in which clips are attached to the folded skin on lambs' backsides, causing the skin to rot and fall off. Clips are not an alternative to the mulesing mutilation; they are simply a less bloody form of it. We are pleased, however, to see that the wool industry has finally responded to the complaints of dozens of retailers around the world who want to buy only wool from sheep who were not mulesed (not even with clips) and who have asked that wool from clip-mulesed sheep be identified on a mulesing declaration form.

As the Australian Weekly Times wrote, "For an organisation that purports to be a research and marketing body, the decision by Australian Wool Innovation to abandon the mulesing deadline is reckless, unwanted and unhelpful." This shows that your voices—and those of retailers who are demanding that Australia join the 21st century and stop mutilating lambs—are being heard in Australia.

Please help PETA continue to pressure the Australian government to do the right thing by taking a few short moments to write to Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, to demand that mulesing be outlawed now. And, if you still wear animals even when so many wonderful alternatives exist, ask yourself why.

Written by Tracy Reiman

theage / CC

The pressure is on for the Australian wool industry! Jiangsu Sunshine Group, a $1.8 billion Chinese textile company, is the world's largest buyer of Australian wool—and it's calling on the Aussie wool industry put an end to mulesing.

The mulesing mutilation is the practice of slicing chunks of flesh from around sheep's tails—without any pain relief—to prevent "flystrike" (i.e., to prevent sheep from being eaten alive by maggots in the folds of flesh on their rump). Flystrike is awful, of course, but there are plenty of humane alternatives to mutilation for flystrike prevention that are in use by many wool farmers. In fact, New Zealand has done away with mulesing altogether!

Sunshine's action will hopefully force folks like Australian Wool Innovation Chair Wal Merriman to abandon this cruel practice once and for all. In a recent article, Merriman thumbed his nose at retailers and consumers by admitting that he will continue to mules his sheep, despite the fact that a growing list of retailers, including H&M, Perry Ellis, Adidas, and many others, want only nonmulesed wool.

Sunshine said in its letter to the Federation of Australian Wool Organisations: "In the last three years, increasing requests have been made from our major international customers to provide product as made from non-mulesed Australian wool due to the strong pressure of the animal liberation movement."

In other words, keep those cards and letters coming!

Written by Jeff Mackey

If you haven't given up wool yet, here are five reasons to make that commitment to animals now: Faith, Lily, Mae, Pete, and Lucy. These are some of the sheep whose suffering was documented by a group of concerned Australians who have been wrangling with do-nothing authorities to help a horribly neglected flock.

This is Faith before and after treatment for flystrike.

The investigators photographed the bodies of dead and dying sheep around a Smeaton, Australia, property. One of the carcasses was contaminating the only readily available water source for the living sheep.

Many of the sheep on the property are being eaten alive by maggots. This condition is called "flystrike," and it is preventable with proper attention and care. In Australia, sheep farmers use a barbaric mutilation called "mulesing" in a crude attempt to prevent flystrike, but it did not help Pete or Lucy, who had advanced flystrike and died soon after the group found them. Lucy had one of the worst cases of flystrike that one investigator had ever seen: "Severely fly struck she was close to death and of course extremely distressed. She was panting hard, eyes wide with terror but unable to rise. Lucy had been mulesed, however like millions of other sheep in this country still suffered the horrors of flystrike."

Lucy's flystrike was so debilitating she couldn’t get up off the ground.

Flies were eating away at Pete.

After repeated attempts to get the Department of Primary Industries to take action, local citizens attempted to help some of the ewes on the Smeaton property who had babies who depended on them for survival. Faith's injuries were successfully treated, but Lily and Mae had to be taken to a veterinarian and euthanized. Their lambs are unlikely to survive without them.

Lily's leg had been eaten away.

Mae's hindquarters were a typical result of flystrike.

The appalling conditions on the Smeaton farm are not an isolated case of neglect and abuse. Domesticated sheep are vulnerable to flystrike because they have been bred to have wrinkly skin that produces an unnatural amount of wool. Breeding for "bare breech" is one option that would make sheep less vulnerable, but, in Australia, which produces 30 percent of the world's wool, the vast flocks of sheep cannot be given the individual care and attention necessary to prevent flystrike and other illnesses. After enduring these conditions, Australian sheep are crammed onto filthy boats for live export to the Middle East—a trip that many do not survive—where they are dragged to slaughter and have their throats cut while they are conscious and struggling.

The best way to help Australian sheep is to avoid buying any wool, as it is difficult to know where wool originates. Urge the Australian prime minister to make this kind of cruelty to lambs illegal.

Written by Heather Drennan

Australian wool farmers are very fond of the myth that the mulesing mutilation (cutting the rump flesh off completely conscious lambs) is the most effective way to prevent flystrike, but we know it's only done because it's cheaper than more humane methods of controlling the affliction. These photos, recently taken on a paddock in Victoria, show several sheep suffering from absolute misery, severe neglect and flystrike, despite the fact that some had been mulesed! Yeah. Those farmers sure do care.

Many sheep found on this paddock had such severe cases of flystrike or were so starved or otherwise neglected that they required emergency treatment provided by caring civilians. Some were suffering so badly that they had to be euthanized immediately. Fortunately, an Australian animal rights activist has called for an intervention by the local authorities and has submitted this formal complaint (So far there's been no response yet.)

Australian farmers get away with cutting lambs open and leaving them to be eaten alive by maggots under the pretext of keeping them healthy. Does that sound wrong to anyone else? Please help stop this cruelty by boycotting Australian wool and informing the farmers that mulesing is wrong.

Written by Lianne Turner

I'm pretty sure my mother has set up Google News alerts for my name. So when I saw a News of the Weird–esque article in Australia's Weekly Times about an Aussie senator, Bill Heffernan, taking jabs at me to the media by talking about my—ahem—circumcision, I knew it was just a matter of time before she'd see it too. Proactively, I e-mailed her the article with the subject line, "Should I be honored by this?"

Now, I'm sure you're all wondering what an elected official was doing talking about my naughty bits to the press. Well, there's a perfectly, um, reasonable explanation: I oversee PETA's campaign against mulesing—a cruel mutilation in which Australian farmers hack chunks of lambs' flesh from their backsides without as much as an aspirin for pain relief. It's the cheapest way to prevent a fly infestation that is dangerous—but that could be prevented if farmers would just look after the sheep instead of abandoning them in open fields and forgetting about them until slaughter or shearing. So, in his frustration over the fact that we've been getting major retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch and Perry Ellis to stop using Australian wool, Senator Heffernan lashed out. Check out this juicy excerpt from the article:

My reply? "Dear Senator Heffernan, You were right: I have indeed been circumcised. Fortunately, my parents didn't perform the cut in a field with a pair of garden shears, and they didn't remove my flesh because of a financial interest. No such luck for lambs." (You can read the full reply here.)

My mother's reply? "I'm not sure this is a compliment, but I guess you can't beat a senator talking publicly about your circumcision."

Written by Matt Prescott

sheep101 / CC

Yesterday, PETA sent a letter to the Australian wool industry on behalf of numerous major clothing retailers—including Gap, Liz Claiborne, Nordstrom, Haggar Clothing, Coppley Apparel, Austin Reed, Carter's, C&A Europe, Bestseller A/S, and Matalan Retail Limited—encouraging the addition of a "clip mulesing" tick box to the industry's new nonmulesed-certification form.

In addition, Nike, Lindex, Marks & Spencer, and H&M sent their own letters urging the industry to add clip mulesing to the certification.

So, what is this tick box, and why is it important? Well, the wool industry has made a certification form to allow retailers to purchase wool from lambs who haven't undergone the mulesing mutilation. (Yay!) But under the current certification, if a retailer also doesn't want wool from lambs who have undergone clip mulesing—where their skin is painfully killed using tight clamps—they can't get it. (Boo!)

So PETA flexed a little muscle and got 15 major clothing retailers, whose sales total more than AUD $100 billion (yes, that's "billion" with a "B"), to send a strong message to the wool industry that they oppose clip mulesing and want to avoid mulesing of any kind in their supply chains.

Of these companies, one—Nordstrom—stands out. Nordstrom was ready to pilot the certification program for all its own-label 2009 men's merino wool sweaters. After figuring out that the industry couldn't guarantee that no clip mulesing was used for the sweaters, Nordstrom backed out of the program. But then it went even one step further and decided to source all that wool from outside Australia instead!

Kudos to Nordstrom and these 14 other retailers for helping send the strong message that clip mulesing is not acceptable and that real alternatives to mulesing must be put in place.

The world is watching, Australia ….

Written by Matt Prescott, PETA Corporate Affairs

As a clarion call to people of faith, a priest recently bestowed a blessing upon sheep who were bound for live export aboard a cargo ship in Fremantle, Western Australia. In a public display of solidarity, the priest blessed the sheep with holy water before they were loaded onto the cargo ship Mayora.

Father Mostowik is the director of missionaries for the Sacred Heart Justice and Peace Centre and is certainly no stranger to social justice. Thankfully, his ethics include the understanding that compassion must reach to all beings, not just the talking two-legged ones. His powerful message, while unspoken, was made loud and clear. It is a signal to us believin' folk of various faiths that our duty of compassion should extend to all of God's creatures.

While it's wonderful that Father Mostowik is using what he believes is right to take action in his own way, we here at PETA know that these animals need a heck of a lot more than a kind blessing. These animals need action, kindness, and support.

The slave ships that drag these animals across the globe are an ugly truth that usually goes unseen. Crammed together with hardly any room to move, some animals often don't survive the journey. Australian sheep are kicked, beaten, and dragged off boats by their ears and legs; they are often left to suffer and sometimes die in barren feedlots. They are bound up and thrown into the trunks of cars, and they are slaughtered in prolonged and cruel ways that are illegal in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. A PETA investigation in 2006 revealed horrible cruelty in this industry. You can watch the video here.

We hope Father Mostowik has the ear of quite a few people who've yet to hear just how horribly these animals are abused.

The fact that more and more religious leaders are taking aim to relieve the suffering of animals indicates an exciting shift in public consciousness. However, these calls to action merely point the way. In order to alleviate the suffering of millions of animals who are bound for our dinner plates, archaic recreation, or clothing, the responsibility to act falls on every one of us cruelty-free peeps no matter what holidays we celebrate.

Written by Missy Lane

Always a bit of a wild child, PETA Germany definitely has a flare for the exotic. Just take a look at these anti-zoo, anti-circus "Exotic Animals Belong in Liberty" ads. They featured a menagerie of MTV Germany and VIVA music channel hosts painted as exotic animals (my fave is the contemplative tiger). They were recently published in the German TV magazine TV Digital. Way to go, PETA G!

Written by Amy Elizabeth

directnews / CC

Regular readers know that mulesing is a process whereby sheep farmers in Australia turn lambs upside-down and cut off the skin and flesh on their rumps with a pair of gardening shears and without any pain relief. Now there are reports that Australian Wool Innovation (AWI), in response to PETA's campaign to end mulesing, has developed another new mulesing alternative, but being hopeful of progress by AWI is something that makes me nervous to no end.

This alternative is an injection that smoothes out the animals' skin (when it's all full of folds, maggots can hatch and eat the sheep alive). The injection is not perfect—the animals are still stressed out from being handled—but it seems relatively painless, which is a huge step forward in embracing the concept that less pain doesn't equal no pain).

We won't break out the champagne yet. In 2004, AWI agreed to end mulesing by 2010, but they've been dragging their heels disgracefully. Then they developed a different (but still very painful) type of skin-removal technique called "clip mulesing," in which big clips are clamped onto lambs' bottoms so tightly that the flesh dies and falls off, and called it "humane." Rotting, dying skin. Ewe.

So we raised a ruckus in the clothing retail industry, causing companies like H&M, Perry Ellis, and Adidas to reject all wool from mulesed lambs (including those mulesed using the hideous clips).

The injection, however, just might be a most-welcome forward movement for all those Aussie lambs.

Written by Matt Prescott