NEW YORK — Australia’s wool industry is stepping up efforts to defuse the effects of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals-led boycott that has gained momentum in the last year.
A coalition of wool and agricultural organizations started publicly addressing the biggest issue, a practice called mulesing, in a series of advertisements that began appearing in trade and fashion magazines, including WWD, in May. While the ad campaign helps explain the issue to consumers, groups such as Australian Wool Innovation, a research and development company representing the country’s wool industry, have been meeting with retail and manufacturing executives in an effort to convey a full understanding of the industry’s practices.
Mulesing was among the key issues PETA cited when the animal rights group kicked off its campaign against Australian-grown merino wool in October 2004.
Mulesing is used by Australian farmers to prevent sheep from being infested with the larvae of an Australian blowfly called the Lucilia cuprina, which lays its eggs in the damp wool around the sheep’s anus and genitals. Unlike other fly larvae, Lucilia cuprina maggots burrow into the skin and devour healthy flesh, a condition called flystrike that may cause the death of the animal. To prevent flystrike, farmers remove the skin from around the area. The wound scabs and, once healed, leaves scar tissue that is thicker and resistant to flystrike.
The wool industry’s ads argue that mulesing is necessary and that a boycott would hurt the animals, and the global wool supply.
“It is estimated that, without mulesing, up to 3 million Australian sheep would die a slow and agonizing death each year,” the ads say.
The campaign makes no mention of a self-imposed 2010 deadline to institute an alternative treatment.
The ads have also created a rift within the industry. The Australian Wool Growers Association opposed the AWI-led advertising campaign in a statement released in June, calling the effort “another disaster” that would fail to sway the retail sector.
“Any elementary marketing textbook will tell you to promote the positives of your product, yet here we are telling the world that we have a problem with our wool,” Martin Oppenheimer, AWGA vice chairman, said in the statement. “This is naïveté at the very least, arrogance at its worst, by our leaders, and we would seek an urgent reevaluation of any more expenditure of this kind.”
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PETA’s efforts could have a significant impact on not only Australia’s economy, but the apparel industry, as well. Australia is one of the largest producers of wool in the world, with 106 million sheep producing more than 1.05 billion pounds of wool in 2004, according to data from AWI. Wool exports were $2.8 billion in 2004, representing 2.5 percent of Australia’s total exports. Only beef and wheat outpaced wool as the country’s top agricultural exports. When it comes to apparel, Australian wool accounts for almost 50 percent of the global total.
With its campaign less than a year old, PETA said it has gained a substantial list of allies from the apparel industry. According to PETA’s campaign Web site, savethesheep.com, American Eagle Outfitters publicly agreed to join the boycott in May, joining a list that includes Abercrombie & Fitch, J. Crew, Timberland, Limited Brands and Indigenous Designs. However, the Australian Wool and Sheep Industry Taskforce released a statement in May that said industry officials had spoken with Timberland and J. Crew and both indicated that they were not joining the boycott. A Timberland spokeswoman said the company does not support boycotts. The other named retailers declined to comment.
PETA is keeping the pressure on the apparel industry’s biggest vendors, as well. On May 18, Matthew Rice, a PETA campaign coordinator, attended the annual shareholders meeting for Jones Apparel Group and asked president and chief executive officer Peter Boneparth why Jones Apparel was not doing more to influence the Australian wool industry. Boneparth noted the wool industry had vowed to institute a new practice by 2010 and that Jones was working to make that happen sooner than later. Rice got a similar response from Paul Charron, chairman and ceo of Liz Claiborne Inc., during the company’s annual meeting the day after Jones’ gathering.
Claiborne has thrown a bit more of its corporate muscle behind the issue. The company’s general counsel, Roberta Karp, sent a letter to Les Targ, deputy ceo of AWI, days before the annual meeting, prodding the group to quicken its timetable to end mulesing.
“We acknowledge Australian Wool Innovation’s commitment to end mulesing by 2010; however, as we understand it, the Australian wool industry has shown little inclination to rapidly pursue the development of such a viable alternative,” the letter said. Claiborne went on to “strongly urge” the Australian wool industry to adopt an alternative by no later than the first quarter of 2007.
Claiborne didn’t say that it would join the boycott in the near future.
“Many companies and trade groups have, in our view, prematurely agreed to boycott or limit their use of Australian wool,” the letter said. “We do not feel that an immediate boycott is the appropriate response.”
However, the company said it would join the boycott if it did not see “documented progress within the time frame.”
“It’s become a retailer-led movement to end the practice,” said Rice, noting that PETA representatives also attended the annual shareholder meetings for Nordstrom, Limited Brands, American Eagle and Talbots.
Rice conceded that some of the retailers who have agreed to the boycott don’t sell much merino wool-based clothing, “but they’re proving fashionable clothing doesn’t have to come from mutilated animals.”
Rice also asserts that flystrike is a problem of the Australian wool industry’s own making, with sheep being bred to be more wrinkly and thus more profitable.
“They should breed for smooth-skin sheep that are better suited for the Australian climate,” Rice said.
Reversing hundreds of years of breeding won’t happen quickly. In the meantime, PETA believes that there are alternatives the industry has failed to implement.
AWI announced it had completed the first successful trials of a needle-free injection system for a “natural mulesing protein” in June. The process is said to be painless and achieves the same benefits as surgical mulesing. AWI doctors and researchers have said that the final product could be introduced as an alternative by 2007.
AWI and the AWGA have gone their separate ways in dealing with PETA, as well. AWI has pursued legal action against PETA, a move the AWGA believes is long, costly and unlikely to reach a beneficial conclusion.
The AWGA held two days of what PETA characterized as “cordial and frank talks” in New York in June. While no agreement was reached between the two groups, the AWGA said the meetings were “extremely positive.”
Stuart McCullough, a product commercialization manager with AWI, said his organization is no longer trying to work with PETA.
Most recently, the AWGA issued an industry scorecard on mulesing. According to the statement, released July 12, a post-mulesing pain-relief treatment, an anaesthetic spray, is being registered and is slated for introduction this year. The AWI’s nonsurgical mulesing injection will hopefully be ready for widespread use by 2007, followed by the complete abolition of surgical mulesing in 2010.
“The best combat is education and communication,” McCullough said. “We’ve got to really be apprising the retailers of our practices, the staging between now and 2010 of a mulesing alternative and the amount of research we’re putting into this.”