Blowfly strike causes horrific suffering in sheep when flies lay eggs in wool, with larvae consuming living tissue, requiring prevention and rapid treatment.
Flystrike causes extreme suffering as larvae literally eat living sheep alive. Affected sheep experience intense pain, weakness, and if untreated, death from tissue destruction and shock. Prevention through regular inspection, appropriate wool management, and targeted insecticide use is both humane and economically rational. Mulesing presents the welfare dilemma of acute procedural pain versus prevention of potentially more severe flystrike.