UK WOOL retailers have rejected the notion that mulesing is now a minor issue.

The British Retail Consortium this week hit back at the claim, made late last month by Australian Wool Innovation board member David Webster.

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Mr Webster said that while many of the retailers' corporate social responsibility departments had been pushing for unmulesed wool, their buying departments were thinking otherwise.

"It's very difficult to see how anyone in a senior position in the industry could form the view that mulesing has gone away as an issue," said BRC policy director Jane Milne, who last month organised a meeting last month between AWI, WoolProducers and the Australian Wool Exchange.

"We have not changed our position one iota from the 2005 compact, which sought to eradicate mulesing by the end of next year.

"My members are seeking to move their supply chains across to non-mulesed sources now that an increasing amount of non-mulesed and ceased mulesed wool is becoming available.

"We recognise that breeding solutions will take time and that husbandry alone will not be sufficient protection from blowfly strike in many areas except for the plainest bodied sheep.

"But we do expect AWI's research findings on alternatives to mulesing to be adopted into commercial practice as quickly as possible."

The BRC re-affirmation co-incides with a letter from US global retailer GAP to the animal activist group PETA saying it remained committed to buying wool from farmers who spurned mulesing.

GAP spokesman Dan Henkle said the company did not condone mulesing and was committed to buying all its Merino wool from farms that had ended the practice.

In other news on the management of flystrike, the Sheep Co-operative Research Centre, which is partially funded by AWI, is stepping up the development of an "easy care" sheep.

As part of the "easy care" package, the Sheep CRC will also promote the pending release of DNA predictions on wool-staple strength and intra-muscular fat.

The Sheep CRC said combining conventional breeding values with genomic predictions based on DNA analysis would allow breeders to assess a lamb's breeding potential at birth for a range of traits.

Sheep CRC chief executive Prof James Rowe said new traits of value were likely to be in areas of product quality and animal health.

These included eating quality, meat colour, lean-meat yield, staple strength, breech wrinkle, dags and worm-egg count.

AWI declined to comment.