Mutilations' is the technical term used by vets and scientists to describe a variety of operations. Each year millions of farm animals in the UK are mutilated. Most of these painful operations are performed without any anaesthetic. CIWF is opposed to all unnecessary mutilations of farm animals.
Scientific research shows that castration inflicts severe pain on lambs.
Farmers say they castrate their lambs because once they become sexually mature, they become aggressive and breed indiscriminately. However many lambs are slaughtered before reaching the age of sexual maturity. This makes a nonsense of farmers' stated reason for castration. This call has been ignored by sheep farmers who continue to castrate the vast majority of male lambs. A survey published in 1996 in the British Veterinary Journal found that the majority of flockmasters using the bloodless castrator use too large a model which can result in excessive crushing pressures over an unnecessarily large area of the scrotum.