The industry group Australian Wool Innovation has reached an agreement with animal rights organizations, after more than two years of litigation. PETA is calling the news “the beginning of the end of mulesing mutilations in Australia.” The Australian wool industry has agreed to invest in selectively breeding sheep to be bare in their hind-quarters and to develop sheep that are genetically resistant to infestations.

Many of you are probably asking, “What the heck is mulesing? And how could it possibly be worse than genetically altering animals?” Mulesing is the practice of cutting off the flesh around a sheep's legs and tail, often without anesthesia, to prevent flystrike, or flies laying eggs in between the wrinkles of the skin. Once the eggs hatch, the larval flies – yes, I'm talking about maggots – eat away at the sheep’s flesh. Visualizing either mulesing or flystrike is equally grotesque, which is why tinkering with sheep genes has won out in the negotiations.

The industry also has agreed to allow products to be labeled as using wool coming from non-mulesed or mulesed sheep. It is not clear if this labeling also would apply to wool byproducts, such as lanolin. In exchange, PETA has agreed to stop public campaigns against specific retailers, although it has pledged to continue to push for general consumer boycotts of mulesed wool products, which will include storefront demonstrations and negotiations with companies that sell wool products.

Despite PETA’s exhaltations, I’m not sure that this is an animal rights victory worth bragging too much about, since the sheep will how be subjected to genetic experimentation in addition to suffering in the wool industry. Don’t get me wrong, I do want to see an end to cruelty in wool production - especially mulesing – and I know progress comes in incremental changes. But it would seem that successfully increasing consumer demand for non-mulesed wool (or even better, non-wool fabric alternatives) would be more of a victory than trading one exploitive practice for others.

Even if the practice of mulesing ends, the wool industry is cruel to animals in other ways. When sheep age and their wool production declines, they are sold for slaughter. The wool industry also participates in widespread wildlife “damage control,” killing animals such as kangaroos and coyotes, which it believes negatively affects wool production. Unfortunately, in this case - at least until more progress is made - genetically altering animals would seem to be the lesser of two evils.