What is mulesing, and how many sheep die on live export?

The objection

“Wool isn’t slaughter. Sheep have to be shorn anyway or they overheat, you’re literally helping them. It’s just a haircut.”

The answer

Shearing isn’t slaughter, and a sheep bred to grow wool without pause does need it, so the objection has the narrow point right. Even so, a freshly shorn sheep loses heat fast, and in cold, wet, windy weather it can die of exposure: Agriculture Victoria’s senior vet wrote in 2025 that deaths have been seen in some mobs up to four weeks after shearing [9]. The haircut picture also leaves out why the sheep needs cutting at all, what is done to Merino lambs to protect the fleece, and the live export ships that Australia has legislated to stop. Whether wool is vegan, and what kind of life a lamb gets before slaughter, have answers of their own.

Do sheep need to be shorn?

Modern wool sheep do, because people bred them to. Wild mouflon, the ancestors of domestic sheep, grow a two-layered coat and shed it every year, and selection for wool turned it into a single coat that keeps growing, as a 2024 review of sheep domestication describes [1]. The cutting is fast work. In Australia most sheep are shorn by professionals paid by the number they shear, up to 200 a day, and the animal-welfare charity RSPCA Australia (2019) says nicks and cuts happen when a sheep struggles, has heavily wrinkled skin or the shearer is distracted or under time pressure, with deep cuts usually sewn up by the shearer [2].

What is mulesing?

Mulesing is cutting flaps of skin from around a lamb’s tail and hindquarters while it is conscious and restrained, so the wound heals into scar tissue that is less attractive to blowflies [3]. The flies lay their eggs on the sheep, especially in the folds of skin around the hindquarters and tail, and the maggots that hatch feed on the sheep’s flesh, risking blood poisoning and death if the strike goes untreated [3]. RSPCA Australia, which calls flystrike itself a serious welfare problem, says Australian woolgrowers are the only ones in the world mulesing lambs routinely, that millions of lambs go through it, and that the wounds take weeks to heal [3]. Pain relief is used more than it was, but it eases the pain only after the cut and lasts hours to days [3]. Victoria and Tasmania require it by law [3], and New South Wales put a bill to its Parliament in May 2026 to require it whatever the sheep’s age [10]. Queensland and South Australia require it only for sheep over six months old, and in late 2025 Western Australia committed to rules that would require it from six months of age (The Land, 2025) [11]. RSPCA Australia’s answer is to breed sheep with fewer wrinkles, which it says are less prone to flystrike, can still grow as much wool and can be bred within a few years [3].

How much wool comes from mulesed sheep?

In Australia, about three in five Merino wool bales still come from mulesed sheep: 60.7% in the 2025/26 season, 54.3% with a pain-relief product and 6.4% without, according to the Australian Wool Exchange, an industry body [4]. Merino was four in five of the bales offered at auction that season. Of its bales, 18.3% were declared non-mulesed, up from 16.5% the season before, 3.8% came from farms that had stopped mulesing, and 17.1% carried no declaration, which growers don’t have to make and RSPCA Australia wants made compulsory [3][4].

How many sheep die on live export ships?

More than 6,500 of the 2.5 million sheep carried on 53 voyages from Australia between 2018 and 2023 died on board, according to an analysis by the animal-welfare charity RSPCA Australia of reports from the independent observers who sail on the ships (2024) [5]. That is about a quarter of 1%, far below the 1.7% of Middle East-bound sheep that died during the voyage on shipments from Western Australia in 1985 and 1986, or the 2.18% of all 6.46 million exported in those two years once deaths during loading and unloading are added (Norris and Richards, 1989) [6]. Most of the recent deaths were from inanition, which the charity calls starvation, or from gut disease, pneumonia or injury, and the count leaves out deaths before loading or after unloading [5]. Deaths were never the whole measure, though: by RSPCA Australia’s reading, 80% of the recent observer reports described sheep starving on board, and more than 60% clear signs of heat stress [5]. The five groups that researchers followed from a Western Australian feedlot onto ships for the Middle East between 1985 and 1987 were all Merino wethers, castrated males of the breed that grows most of Australia’s wool (1989) [4][7]. Australia passed a law in July 2024 that bans the export of live sheep by sea from 1 May 2028 [8].