Did Your Sweater Cause a Bloody Butt? Boycott Australian Wool!

The Australian merino-wool industry’s practice of carving flesh from the backsides of lambs without painkillers is so gruesome that PETA’s latest billboard, showing a lamb’s rump that has been mutilated with a pair of gardening shears next to the tagline “Did Your Sweater Cause a Bloody Butt? Boycott Australian Wool! SaveTheSheep.com,” has been taken down—but not before alerting hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and tourists to the horrors of wool.

The billboard, which showed a graphic image of a lamb who had been subjected to a mutilation called mulesing was so horrifying that the landlord of the building where the billboard was displayed requested that it be taken down. The ad is the latest salvo in PETA’s international campaign against two major forms of cruelty in the Australian merino-wool business: mulesing, during which huge chunks of flesh are hacked from lambs’ rumps with shears, and live export, during which millions of frail sheep are shipped thousands of miles through all weather extremes, mired in their own waste aboard open-deck, multitiered death ships, ending up in the Middle East, where their throats are slit while they are fully conscious. Many sick and injured sheep, treated as cargo, are thrown overboard to drown or be eaten by sharks or are ground up alive in mincing machines. PETA launched a boycott of Australian wool in October after the Australian government ignored repeated pleas to ban mulesing and live sheep exports.

Australia is the largest producer and exporter of wool, accounting for 28 percent worldwide. Prestigious retailer Abercrombie & Fitch has joined the boycott, and J.Crew, an $800 million company, and New Look, a $1 billion company based in London, have also announced that they will not sell cruelly produced Australian wool. PETA has launched a campaign to persuade another international retailer, Benetton, to agree to boycott Australian wool until these two abuses end.

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Click here to watch PETA’s “Australia’s Secret Shame” video to learn more about the violent and bloody Australian wool industry.