Mulesing — removing skin folds around sheep's hindquarters — causes severe acute pain and is the subject of major campaigns to accelerate adoption of pain relief and alternatives.
Mulesing without pain relief causes severe, prolonged suffering. The procedure exposes raw, bleeding wounds that take weeks to heal, during which sheep show clear pain behaviour including tooth-grinding, reduced movement, and altered posture. While flystrike itself is extremely painful — larvae can consume living tissue causing death — mulesing trades one welfare harm for another without addressing the root cause. Breeding plain-bodied Merinos that do not develop the skin folds that harbour flystrike is the only genuinely welfare-positive solution, but selective breeding programmes take years. In the interim, pain relief for all mulesing procedures is a minimum welfare requirement.