At last some sensible comments. The wool bosses that want to appease PETA should listen to these blokes.

More opinion from another group supposedly representing the wool industry. How many broker, grower and industry groups are there, that like to have their two minutes of fame?

Why is this said to be "now the only acceptable option"?

Why did anyone who cared about his/her sheep ever think it was right to perpetrate such cruelty on a living creature without anaesthetic?

More and more people here in Britain are aware of this practice.

We would prefer to avoid wool from mutilated sheep, so 2010 cannot come too soon for us.

This is a step in the right direction, but it will be too easy for the industry to stop at this half way point unless there is some commercial incentive to breed towards a more consumer friendly and equally profitable merino (not the so called genetic solutions some are touting at the moment).

Woolgrowers need to reclaim control of this debate. Clearly pain relief should have been used ages ago but we need to be able to continue to mules and not jepardise the welfare our sheep as the other options will not suffice. Well done the IWB.

People in Britain who are so offended by mulesing just don't understand the suffering that flystrike causes to sheep. It's easy for them, because they can't see the consequence of their judgemental ideology.

They are not the ones who have to walk through paddocks and pick the poor suffering things up, when flies attack their unmulesed breech. They are not the ones who have to cut the wool from their agonising wounds and scrape the maggots off their poor infested flesh - day in day out, year after year.

Using anaesthetic for a procedure as protective and life saving as mulesing is an outbreak of common sense. It provides a humane way forward for as long as it takes - until susceptibility can be bred out, or the fly can be eradicated.

If PeTA's so determined to insist on a phase out of mulesing - perhaps they could share what they are doing to phase-out spaying of dogs and cats in their SNIP vans? - This is a much more invasive surgical procedure than mulesing...and does nothing to save the dog or cats' life.