FORMER Department of Primary Industry lead sheep geneticist Dr Kevin Aitkins has dismissed the Australian Wool Innovation's new fly strike policy, saying it should stop "wasting time" and get back to original aim of phasing out mulesing by breeding.
Dr Aitkins said the preoccupation with looking for a "magic bullet" alternative for surgical mulesing had detracted attention away from the only applicable long term solution - breeding - and failed to acknowledge the "many" producers who had taken the hard decision to abandon mulesing.
Speaking to Rural Press this week, a frustrated Dr Aitkins also said that mulesing was only ever introduced as an interim measure until breeding solutions were implemented.
As early as 1951 research had commenced comparing high and low wrinkle, which revealed bare breech heritability occurred at one score change every 10 years.
"Enough of this time wasting – let's get back to the original sensible aim," Dr Aitkins said.
Documents from the Joint Blowfly committee in 1940 state "the mules operation must not be regarded as an alternative to the policy of breeding towards plain bodied sheep".
"We dropped the ball when this research at Trangie stopped because what we should be able to identify now an accelerated way under a range of different breeding strategies to get plain body heritability," Dr Aitkens said.
"Any short term alternative, whether it be clips or intradermal will still have the same effect and ignite the question that it is interfering with the animal.
"The only solution is breeding and there is not enough pressure on getting breeding right."
He said producers could already be abandoning mulesing on some sections of their flock such as Merino wethers and crossbred ewes.
"No rocket science here but the net effect will be quite rapid reduction in the amount of mulesing undertaken...not total abandonment of mulesing by 2010 but a very good start."
National producer survey figures indicate 52 per cent of producers have a breeding strategy that involves sourcing fewer wrinkled and more bare-breeched rams.
And, 54 per cent of all lambs in 2009 will remain non-mulesed, up from 32 per cent in 2008, according to Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia.
On that, Dr Aitkins said: "Yes we can follow the slow path and select plainer rams and that's alright, but there are some clever things to do in the short term such as dividing breeding ewes likely to produce progeny that do not require mulesing and this will speed up the selection process."
But he added: "Breeding is a complicated set of arrangements and all the possibilities need to be aired – and they are not."
NSW Department of Industry and Investment's (DPII- formerly Department Primary industries) animal genetics researcher Jessica Richards said preliminary heritability work showed breed work would be "slow", but, then added, at least "its permanent".
Early results from the DPII study uncovered that when reducing average wrinkle score of a flock from 3 to 2.8, the distribution of scores was most important.
"In the flock of average wrinkle score three there were 28pc four and five score (very wrinkly animals) and only 4pc one score (plain) animals, but after 10 years (average wrinkle score 2.8) there is only 6pc wrinkle score four or five and 21pc wrinkle score one.
"This means the flock is a lot less susceptible to fly strike, even though the average score hasn't changed much," she said.
Meanwhile, Sam Gill, manager Sheep Genetics said the decade time frame to drop a score was today an "extreme" time frame.
He said with the soon to be introduced Australian Sheep Breeding Values for wrinkle score Australian sheep breeders would have a tool that would "speed up" the genetic progress, and the more producers involved the greater the acceleration of heritability.
Mr Gill said he expected the speed up and development of, and precision of ASBVs for wrinkle score would increase when recorded sheep numbers increased.
Around 12,000 Merino sheep are recorded for wrinkles on Merino Select.
A date for the launch of wrinkle ASBVs has not been set.
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