The possibilities of no-slaughter wool

The Lemon Hill flock. Picture: supplied.

It started with a sheep called Alice. One day, Alice got sick and couldn’t stand so former marine physicist turned sheep farmer Nan Bray became her grazing assistant, taking her out in a sling to a paddock near the house that was full of weeds and grasses. While Alice grazed, Bray noticed something unusual. “She was being very specific about which plant she needed and in which order,” recalls Bray [1]. “Chicory, plantain - another exotic plant that works for intestinal parasites, lucerne, clover, grass. Chicory, plantain, lucerne, clover, grass. Then she’d look up at me as if to say, ‘can we move on now?’”

Alice’s precise eating patterns tied in with research Bray had been doing into work of American Professor Fred Provenza. Most scientists think that domestic animalls eat whatever’s in front of them. Provenza roundly debunked this myth, showing that, when given a choice, animals have an astoundingly refined palate, nibbling on as many as fifty kinds of grasses, phorbs, and shrubs a day to meet nutritional needs. “I always thought sheep ate grass but grass is actually the last choice on the forage list,” admits Bray. “Diversity is really important to them.” 

From that point, Bray started seeing pasture weeds as a sort of sheep medicine chest and stopped spraying. The insight arrived at just the right time. Bray had bought Lemon Hill, near Oatlands in Tasmania, a small island off Australia’s southern coast, in 2000, almost on a whim and without any experience of wool growing. She had been heading up Australia’s national CSIRO research agency’s Marine Research Division in Hobart when she had fallen in love with the landscape and the potential of the industry but setback after setback - including prolonged dry spells - was stripping the dream away. After a particularly bad lambing season, Bray took stock: “The sheep had all the protein, all the energy and fibre they needed - but they weren’t healthy. I had prolapsed uteruses, pregnancy toxemia, calcium deficiencies. And the farm looked like a desert. I thought, either I have to  do something different, or get out of this business.” 

White Gum Wool is named for the White Gum or Eucalyptus trees indigenous to the area. PIcture: supplied.

Running the farm like other sheep farmers, however, was never going to be an option. Farming sheep for wool is a system egregiously in need of revolt. Flocks are thousands deep. Standard practices such as tail docking (when lambs tails are cut off, often without pain relief) and mulesing (when skin around a lamb’s buttocks is sliced off, again often without pain relief) are only rendered necessary by the intensive conditions in which sheep are kept. Repetitive arguments that wool is a ‘by-product’ obfuscate the reality that most sheep bred for wool are slaughtered and sold as ‘meat’, as young as 5 or 6 years old, largely because the quality of their wool decreases. 

Many lambs never make it to a slaughterhouse, with 10 to 15 million of them dying of exposure, starvation or neglect in the first 48 hours of their lives during Australia’s harsh winter lambing seasons. [2] It’s a terrible way to treat sociable, sensitive animals [3]. And all this without considering that, in Australia, 54% of land clearing is due to animal grazing. “Approximately 80 percent of the native flora was wiped out within the first 30 years of farming,” says Jamie Lowe, chief executive of the National Native Title Council. “It’s devastating.” [3]

Californian-born Bray marched into Tasmania - population half a million people,  2.2 million sheep - with new ideas. Her brand, White Gum Wool, is named for the twisted trunks of the White Gum or Eucalyptus trees indigenous to the area. “I came into [farming] with a very strong environmental focus,” she says. “I knew what I wanted the landscape to look like,” Her starting point was ecologist Aldo Leopold, one of the founders of the US Wilderness Society. Leopold believed in creating landscapes that worked for all stakeholders, wild and domestic, plant and animal. Reading Leopold, encountering Provenza, then watching Alice get to work on her weeds, the philosophies merged. Create a diverse and wild landscape that allows the sheep all the conditions they need, thought Nan, and everything - land, sheep, wool - will thrive. 

The society of sheep

Like most mammals, sheep learn from their mums. In conventional systems, however, sheep are divided into year classes. “At four months, the babies don’t have a clue,” tuts Bray. “They’re like toddlers wandering around a grocery store, which means a lot of weaners have problems with disease, particularly intestinal parasites.” To coach a generation of mothers unfamiliar with the land, and unused to the freedom of nurturing themselves, Bray decided to show them herself. She became a sheperd, striding over Lemon Hill with her sheepdogs, guiding her flock to the richest parts of the property.

“This was me saying to the sheep, ‘Okay, I know where the biodiversity is, I'm going to take you there and I'm going to hold you in that place so that you have to eat something,’” she says. It takes two to three years before a baby learns what a mother knows.“So you just can’t wean them,” she says, firmly. Bray’s oldest sheep is an unheard-of 14-years-old. “The 14-year-olds, the 10-year-olds, the eight-year-olds, they know this property. So when they have babies, there’s a huge amount of knowledge being transmitted.” 

Today, her 600 sheep run in one big inter-generational flock (“apart from the Pipsqueak, the ram,” she says. “He’s got his own little group of boys to keep him company.”) “My sheep got bolshie,” laughs Bray, of one of the unexpected consequences. “If I go into a paddock, instead of running away, they turn around and look at me as if to say, ‘what's your business here?” She once saw a family group protect a sick ewe from crows. “Once you allow multiple generations in a flock, you have a social structure that supports all the animals. It’s as if they know they have family at their back. This is important, because sheep are social animals.” Why don't we think about this stuff, I ask. “Well, I never thought about it until I walked around the landscape with them day after day and watched.” 

Davey and Nan in 2015. Picture: White Gum Wool.

Bray’s attitude to her animals has changed. In 2000, they were “little machines that ate grass and grew.” Now, her voice softens as she speaks about them. She was guided in the learning by an elderly shepherd named Davey Carnes, who came out of retirement to help on the farm and became her most trusted advisor. Carnes died last year. “He was one of the kindest human beings I've ever met,” she remembers, fondly. “And he was a wizard with sheep. They would be crazy with me and he would walk in and everything would be calm. He was so attached to the animals that just being around him, you couldn't help but go ‘oh, actually, these are sentient beings with personalities and senses of humour.’” 

She also now regards nutrition as an animal right. “They deserve to have that choice. It's an essential part of being as healthy as it's possible for them to be.” In an age when industrially farmed animals are fed different versions of muck, this feels like a ray of light.

It’s undoubtedly challenging to be a wool farmer in Australia. Since the 1970s, cheap synthetic fabrics have taken over, to the point where they now make up 64 percent (and rising) of the global fibre market [4]. Meanwhile, episodes of extreme weather conditions caused by climate breakdown, including drought, bushfires and low temperatures, have increased. In 2020, the national clip (or wool crop) fell almost 10 percent because the land was so dry. And concerns over animal welfare are - finally -  starting to bite, something both customers and more progressive farmers say they are grateful for. More and more fashion brands will proclaim, at the very least, that they do not use wool from sheep who have been mulesed. Bray has never mulesed, a move that put her at odds with traditional stakeholders but aligned with ethical culture.  

Bray and a lamb. Picture: supplied.

Inevitably, the sheep have made their way onto White Gum Wool’s social media feeds. The website is peppered with their names and stories: Jeff, the “beautiful, big, handsome wether with impeccable manners” or Clara, “the sweetest temperament, and always strives to be near me when I’m shepherding.” Alice died at the grand old age of 16 but her serious little face continues to gaze out from the labelling cinched around fat balls of White Gum wool. Inevitably, given her care and contact with them, it became impossible for Bray to send her animals to slaughter. “I remember the moment,” she says. “I was watching my sheep and I thought, ‘I don’t want to put my sheep on a transport truck. Ever again. And no one can make me.’ Some of them were like pets, others had become friends, but all of them were animals I cared about. It was the experience they were going to have, of being driven somewhere, taken off the truck. I didn’t want to do that to them.” 

Bray still has to euthanize elderly animals: “But here, I can control it. I know what they’re going through.” And yet, the most startling aspect - for fellow farmers, at least - is Bray’s refusal to dock her sheep’s tails, saying that lambs with tails are healthier. For all their hardiness, Australia’s sheep farmers are very concerned with what happens at the back end of their sheep. Tail docking and mulesing take place ostensibly to “reduce the incidence of blowfly strike that may result from urine and faecal staining.” But with their healthy digestion, Bray’s sheep don’t get fly strike. “Just within a year of getting biodiversity back up and consciously moving the sheep into more diverse areas, I stopped having to treat my sheep for intestinal parasites,” she says, proudly. [5]

To compensate shearers for the added fiddliness of sheep with tails, she pays them more. It’s not until you see sheep with long swinging tails do you realise how unusual it is.  “People come to my farm and say ‘that’s so weird,’” says Bray. “But not tail docking has a wonderful side effect. When they’re walking, they walk in synchrony and their tails go back and forth together. And that movement exercises the pelvic floor, so I stopped having trouble with uterine prolapse.” [6] 

Happier, healthier sheep means better wool - and Bray’s wool is exceptional. Her 600 sheep produce 2,000 kilograms of the sought-after 17-micron a year. "Her wool's like angel dust. It's beautiful stuff, some of the finest wool about here," offers head shearer Dave Acheson - and that’s from sheep considered too old to keep alive. [7] Meanwhile, Bray’s ethics, her professionalism, the quality of her wool and her refusal to kill her sheep which are behind the relationship with her customers, the luxury ethical brand, Another Tomorrow. Founded by former managing director of Morgan Stanley Vanessa Barboni Hallik, ethical practice lies at the heart of the project, with animal welfare one of the brand’s three pillars, alongside environmental and human concerns. 

Animal rights in Fashion

"We don't use any fibre that requires the killing or harm of an animal. The fact that much of the wool industry does rely upon the meat industry to supplement income is something that doesn't sit well with me.” Hallik said, in an interview [8]. “No-slaughter wool is important to us in operating on our own values and, crucially, to our mission to demonstrate that it is possible to do so while delivering exquisite products without compromise,” she continues, by email. “As humans, we have an immense impact on the lives of sentient beings through the way we’ve developed industrialized agriculture (among other aspects) and with that, I believe deep responsibility.” The brand recently gained Angelina Jolie as strategic adviser. When the actress, who also owns the sustainable fashion business Atelier Jolie, opened The Residency in New York earlier this month (at 57 Great Jones St, Jean Michel Basquiat’s old studio) Another Tomorrow was its first Designer in Residence. 

“The information on the unfathomable impact we have on animals as a society is rooted in science,” continues Hallik. “It is a matter of making ethical decisions as business leaders or actively looking away, which is a choice of convenience over compassion.” Hallik found just three producers who didn't kill their older sheep. Bray’s was the most commercial. The collaboration is a meeting of minds. “While Gum Wool is incredibly unique. Nan and I hit it off personally from the start,” Barboni says. “We are both career changers. Our respective backgrounds in science and finance root us in hard numbers and reality, but with alternative visions and tenacity to spearhead change. I could not believe I had found a partner that so holistically encompassed our values.” 

Levels of awareness of animal welfare in fashion are still low but growing, says Barboni. Her approach is to place the issue on a par with environment and human welfare via the three pillars while offering gorgeous alternatives. But while that may work for Another Tomorrow; it is less successful at Lemon Hill. Resistance to Bray’s revolutionary methods is strong and ongoing, despite the admittedly buoyant state of her farm, her business, her wool and her animals. Bray’s next door neighbours are one of the biggest landowners in Tasmania with 100,000 acres and thousands of cattle and sheep, all conventionally reared. “I despair - but we’re friends,” she adds, ruefully. “We laugh about the fact that, when a fire comes across my property, it stops at theirs because there’s nothing to burn.” 

But the lack of uptake remains a source of frustration. Bray runs a small flock, “about a quarter of what most people in my area think is a standard stocking rate” but, because they’re well and happy,  they produce 30 percent more wool - and wool that commands premium prices. “ I thought everyone was going to want to know,” she says of her learnings. “But nobody did. For my own sanity, I’ve stopped proselytising to people who aren’t ready to hear but that hasn’t stopped me talking or writing about it.” Her blogs are a wealth of knowledge and reflection; jottings from shepherding, funny things that the sheep did. As a result, Bray says she’s discovered a “reservoir” of like-minded people (“mostly women”) within the industry itself, “people who want to feel better about agriculture” but who have yet to make a shift. 

Most animal advocates would like to see a future in which no animal is used for anything. But human society is in transition and transitions are messy. While keeping an eye towards a world of multi-species justice and of ecological and social harmony, projects like Bray’s operate in the chaotic middle with integrity. “It’s an interesting place to be,” she muses. She’s thinking about the millions of sheep around the world, living in various states of misery, divided from their families; fed badly; tossed and mistreated during shearing; slaughtered as juveniles. “There are times you can get overwhelmed by the enormity of what isn’t working right and how awful that is. But I feel blessed I’ve had the chance to do what I’m doing.”

Her connection to the land and the animals is very deep. “It’s about finding humility in yourself. I’ve learnt a lot from the sheep and the farm - ways to alter my internal state, the way I bring myself into it. After failed attempts to get the sheep to do what I wanted, I realised, for example, that I had to enter sheep time, which is their sense of time and has nothing to do with our sense of time. It’s the same with the land. It’s not an ideology, it’s not a romanticism. It’s an acceptance that there is an intrinsic value in the land that is worth honouring. It sounds philosophical but it allows me to make decisions that are aligned with what needs to happen in a landscape as its own entity.”

A gang of four: Elf, Vicki, Phoenix and Clara. Picture: White Gum Wool.

Then there are the sheep - cheeky, strong-willed, loving, determined. A lot like Bray, in fact. Watching Alice munch her herbs made Bray very happy. So does the antics of eight-year-old Tommy. “He wasn’t in good condition, which is unusual, so I brought him in and gave him cracked lupins as a treat. Tommy thought he’d died and gone to heaven. After that, whenever he saw me coming, he would leave the flock and hang around at the gate and wait for me. This is not usual sheep behaviour but he was able to connect me with something that mattered to him. It’s this wonderful little relationship I have with this single sheep. I get so much joy out of that.”

And that’s just one lupin-loving little personality. With 75 million sheep roaming Australia right now, the country could be the happiest place on the planet. Not yet, though. Not until people wake up and smell the chicory - and the plantain and the lucerne and the clover and the grasses. Bray remains stoic. “Who knows how long this is going to take,” she says, slowly. “But I’m going to keep standing here, going ‘there is  a different way.’”  


[1] Introduction: Landline 241113 A Sheep Called Alice https://youtu.be/lc-1hV5XzUQ?si=8tn6YTjBQTc73bZL
[2] Collective Fashion Justice on Wool. https://www.collectivefashionjustice.org/wool
[3] Marino, L. and Merskin, D. for Farm Sanctuary. 2019. A Review of Cognition,
Emotion, and Social Complexity in Domestic Sheep. Farm Sanctuary. https://assets.farmsanctuary.org/content/uploads/2020/08/26173056/TSP_SHEEP_WhitePaper.pdf
[4] Textile Exchange. https://textileexchange.org/synthetics/
[5] Graham-Mclay, C. 2020. The Unravelling of Wool. Another Tomorrow. https://anothertomorrow.co/pages/the-unravelling-of-wool
[6] Podcast Snippet: Farmers Doing it Differently - Animal Wisdom, Shepherding, & Wool with Nan Bray. 2024.  https://youtu.be/hkwKBsfZFJI?si=jWIyhD0IRDjiyOSG
[7] Graham-Mclay, ibid.
[8] Courtney, P. 2023. Zero-slaughter wool pays off for Tasmanian Nan Bray, who lets her sheep live out their days on her farm. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-04/zero-slaughter-wool-fetches-high-price-for-ethical-fashion/102038550
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