Bronwyn, welcome to the sisterhood of the conspiracy. I don't feel the need to clarify my position on farming any further for the benefit of the obtuse, so won't waste space doing so. Nor will I reiterate the obvious for the same reason, beyond reinforcing the fact that no research would have ever been undertaken into pain relief in the mulesing "procedure" had PETA not stepped in.

PALE, you should provide a source for your statement, which appears to be a quote from somewhere, and also why you believe that media regulation is relevant here. It may be relevant in a broader scope, but the media is notoriously poor at properly reporting animal cruelty matters, so this sort of regulation will make little difference in that sense. Fielding, and church leaders? Go knock yourself out.

Meredith, I agree with your comment in principle, I would have preferred to see PETA campaign more rigorously against the live export trade, but given that local groups are so constrained by funding limitations, I am grateful for input from a powerful international source on any matter pertaining to cruelty. You also overlook the following facts though - mulesed sheep also get flystrike (and die from it), flies do not only attack the breech area of the sheep (so what happens then? Do they cut slices from other parts of the sheep?) and not all sheep are prone to/get flystrike at all. Given that a substantial number of farmers abandoning mulesing there are certainly questions to be asked about mutilating a vast majority of animals in such a fashion, particularly when more frequent crutching is widely thought to be the answer. I read somewhere that 80% of the Tasmanian flock will not be mulesed and Tasmania is no more immune to blowflies than anywhere else.

Nicky

*Mulesing was a huge mistake by PETA, Yabby is right here, the pain on the arse is minor compared to the 3 or 4 day death from fly strike.*

Dear God! Somebody has got it 'RIGHT.'

It has reflected badly on all Animal Welfare Groups and has made it harder to address the much bigger problem- Live Animal Export trade.


PALE will not respond to Nicky direct but how smart are these people. She can’t see why media control could affect Animal rights for God sake. About as smart as the Mulesing issue.

Especially when those same people have vetted interests in that industry but perhaps somebody else might point that out.

Continued
1. Senator Steve Fielding - Putting The Murdoch Family First
Fielding went on to expose a naiveté entirely in accord with the ideology of freedom and individuality that our commercial media want us to swallow while they control our views of the world. An example of this ideology is an advertisement for jeans. It shows a pouting sexpot of a young woman, windswept hair, an arrogant groin-thrusting pose, clad tightly in the particular brand, proclaiming 'no one tells me what to wear!'

Parroting the sentiment of this ad, Fielding said - 'Television, and especially free-to-air television, is the primary source of information and entertainment' for the families he knows, and - 'The programs Australians watch are not determined by who owns what station but the actual programs themselves. Families switch from one station to another depending on what is on.'

So, according to Senator Fielding, we are free individuals because we can choose to watch a Packer, a Stokes or a CanWest station. No one tells Steve Fielding or Australians what to watch on television eh!
TBC

PALE YET AGAIN attributed the wrong comment to the wrong contributor. It was Meredith who made the "pain in the a..." comment. How can this person expect to have even the most remote credibility? Proper - in fact, fundamental - written communication standards require the proper citation of quotes too, but we still do not see the source of this document. As for "Gertrude" (which is the name by which I understand Yabby addresses PALE "However to say Gertrude cant spell is a bit much. Gertrude fyi ‘always topped ‘the classes in spelling and English ‘without study (sic).

Scary indeed. I wonder what school that was? What country it was, even?

Precisely what does this statement say about how media control will affect "animal rights"? Bugger all. In what way is it relevant to this thread? All it says is that PALE now wants to go after Fielding.

The media has always provided censored coverage only on animal rights. Nothing changes. As for "not responding to me ... well, I rest my case. And PALE has also failed to recognise the points I made about mulesing too, but that is typical. If it's not about slaughterhouses (its own) PALE just isn't interested, and basically has no basis for rational comment, since it is not active in animal "rights".

Nicky

*I don't feel the need to clarify my position on farming any further for the benefit of the obtuse, so won't waste space doing so*

Err Nicky dear, we know all about your position on farming and the
real problem is that you know bugger all about farming. Shuffling
papers won't do it for you either. In farming, when you change
one variable, you affect all the others. How they depend on each
other is what you need to understand, but that is way beyond you.
Fair enough, it is not your area of expertise, so you cannot know.

*mulesed sheep also get flystrike (and die from it), flies do not only attack the breech area of the sheep (so what happens then?*

Yes some do, but they are isolated individuals. When I ran merinos,
any sheep that had body strike, was tagged and put on the next
truck out of here.

That is quite different to the breech strike. To put it bluntly,
if you had wool growing within a centimetre of your butthole,
you might well get flystrike too.

When I last had merinos, I did a trial about all this, because
we were already discussing it then. I had some unmulesed merino
lambs here. We shore them in September, in November-Dec some
individuals were already struck again.

Its all very well to say that sheep should be checked more often
and crutched more often. What are you going to do about the millions
of sheep run by hobby farmers, who seldom see them? You are
condemming these sheep to cruel deaths, for the sake of your dogma.

yeh, sorry I have to agree, maybe some certain sheep or climates you could get away with out protection against fly strike but not Tassi, The flyblown sheep I used to see were run on a battery hen farm in the Lower Midlands (1970s and 80s) and the other good farming was more in the Nth East Midlands and they still run a small few these days and muels them.

It is worth asking how much time you have all spent on farms, I grew up on two of them untill 15 years old, I am also a vet nurse

Hello Meredith,my Name is Antje Struthmann and I am a member of Pale.
I am not posting much on OLO because of the bickering that`s going on, but I still read the Forums.
How dare you speak to people like this.

Meredith, let me assure you that Pale raised the very issue re Mulesing many years ago and warned certain Animal Organisations not to join Petabut RSPCA instead.

The odd thing is Pale gave AA and other Animal Welfare Groups including Peta over time very good ideas which they did not want to hear about but then copied them some time later?