Terrick West has an annual lamb drop of about 1800 and last year did not mules any lambs, opting to use the clips and a New Zealand-made rolling gas knife to bare the end of the tail.

Mr McGauchie said he had not had to do anything different yet to the unmulesed sheep, though the October-shorn flock including the weaners were treated with a flystrike backliner.

“And we just didn’t get any flies.

“I’m pretty happy with what we are doing.”

Mr McGauchie said Terrick West was continuing to breed for a plainer-bodied sheep so the 2009-drop lambs did not have a lot of wrinkle on them.

“Everyone is looking for plainer-bodied sheep.”

He said he decided not to mules because of the 2010 deadline and a desire to go into 2011 saying the stud did not mules and sold unmulesed wool. But he said Terrick West would reassess its mulesing policy if there continued to be no premium for wool from unmulesed sheep. He had also not detected any market premium for unmulesed sheep.

“Time will tell,” he said.

Mr McGauchie said wool growers and Merino breeders were hoping that the new skintraction technology would be a viable option. But he said if skintraction could only be done by contractors and not by breeders also this would limit its uptake.

“Most people want to mules their own sheep,” he said.

Mr McGauchie didn’t think “the world will come to an end” if sheep could not be mulesed in the future.

“But it might present us with some challenges.”

At the Willera Poll Merino stud at Serpentine, Robert Hooke said only the sheep with excess skin around the tail have been tail-stripped since 2008.

“We believe those sheep will be classed out of the flock eventually – noone wants sheep that are going to give them trouble.”

Mr Hooke said tail-stripped sheep amounted to only about 10 percent of any drop. Not mulesing the flock had not meant extra work crutching or chasing flies, but he believed the long term answer to mulesing lay in genetics – the selection of plainer bodied sheep.

Willera had been getting “fantastic” results from the genetics they had sourced from Andrew and Rosemary Michael’s Leahcim Poll Merino stud in South Australia, Mr Hooke said. Leahcim had not mulesed their sheep for 10 years.