>Because the competitors are spinning wool that hasn't been processed, it still has lanolin in it. This makes the wool greasier and more difficult to spin, so the ideal is finding a sheep with less lanolin to begin with.
Ha! Exactly what I was thinking when I clicked on the story. Your hands are covered with lanolin just from handling raw wool after shearing. I still have a wool blanket from those days.
*Everything* is covered in lanolin when you're shearing.
I used to wear my scruffiest most ripped zip burst no buttons tied around my waist with string jeans while shearing (in particular while bringing sheep out from the pens to be shorn). I'd wear them for the whole week we were shearing, and then just burn them. There's no way you're rehabilitating anything you wore that week into an item of clothing you can wear in public.
The lanolin helps lubricate the shearing blades, and you need to be very careful washing wool so it doesn’t felt. Show sheep get shampooed but their fleeces are trimmed short first.
I never thought I would find sheep shearing or weaving interesting but this is a really cool article (and contest). It’s really cool to see how people can perfect these somewhat anachronistic skills and even optimize them to accomplish a task in hours that usually takes much longer.
Spinning yarn is one of those things that just catches my fascination. I have a friend that is an avid knitter, and spinning yarn is the next thing she wants to get into. In the style of those social media fads of creating your team of friends to survive the zombie apocalypse together, she always comments on how people want friends with guns or medical experience. She always says "but i can make clothing out of string!" which might come in handy
My wife has always crocheted, and she learned to spin during the pandemic. Then she got a blending board and started making her own blends. Now she’s gotten into dyeing, having just finished her first attempt. She’s already thinking about getting a drum carder to make her own roving.
It’s pretty tempting to go deep, and every step back in the process can add fun!
My friends mom attended this. She mentioned that the wool that was used in the later stages was dyed and clearly wasn’t the same wool they sheared at the beginning. Still a cool concept.
While a little disappointing at first, after thinking about it I suppose they have to use the dyed stuff instead. Otherwise they won't be able to get the impressive patterns and artwork that are part of the point of the competition.
That article goes on to state that the same investigators uncovered cruelty at 117 separate operations, so does not appear to be an isolated incident by, "a few bad apples".
We had one similar in the UK a couple of years back, where a couple of "animal rights activists" got themselves hired at a farm to "document animal cruelty". Not finding any, they set about abusing some animals so they could film it.
I think they're still in prison just now, actually.
Funny that you are not being asked to provide evidence for your extreme claim- everyone just upvotes because it makes them feel better about their life choices again.
Actually no, the fact that you can shear sheep comes out of the fact that sheep have evolved to shed their wool.
When it gets into warmer weather and it's time to shear them, their wool starts to thin, and you get a "rise" - a layer about 5-8mm deep where the individual hairs are about half of their normal thickness. In the wild, these hairs would break and the sheep would shed all its wool in great chunks, but it also makes it a lot easier to shear.
If you've tried cutting the "normal" fleece with hand shears you'll know how hard it is, and it will absolutely destroy mechanical clippers.
That's not to say that sheep haven't been selectively bred to have a good rise, as well as other desirable characteristics - it's not dog breeding, no-one is trying to select for a deformed snuffly nose to please a dog show judge - but the rise was there before they were domesticated, or they likely wouldn't have survived.
They have been selectively bred to produce much more wool than is natural, for human benefit. Their ancestors did not require shearing by humans to survive. If you believe otherwise you're an idiot.
There are over a hundred thousand sheep farms in the US alone. That's 117 in 6 countries, what percentage of farms had bad practices and how were the ones that were audited chosen?
Given that this is PETA, I would not assume good faith here.
Finally, the original poster makes a universal claim about the nature of sheep farming, which your above anecdotes do nothing to support.
Yeah, cause this looks just like a commercial setting <facepalm>
Shearing competitions are pretty common in the world of 4H or other groups for kids. Of course, the animals they are shearing are raised by the kids and they are basically family pets the way they are pampered. Trying to knock what people are doing because of some random holier than though position is just lame
"nicks and cuts may occur if the sheep does struggle, or has excessively wrinkled skin or the shearer is distracted or under time pressure"
Time pressure - exactly what such a competition would encourage. I'm not saying it happens, but the urge to hurry could certainly lead to such a thing.
I mean if winning is the thing, then once the sheep is sheered, who cares about the sheep anymore? It's all about the wool and what you do with it. In 3 hours.
Asked a former champion shearer, who said that maybe 1% of sheep being sheared get nicked, more likely by inexperienced shearers. If the skin is not held taut, nicks will happen. For people who shave their faces with a blade, how often do you nick yourself? Saying "half the sheep's skin" is a ludicrous claim. It's not like skinning mink - you want the animal to survive the process!
Not world, just state. It is a skill where both speed and quality benefit the employer. Would a software company prefer programmers who produce buggy code slowly, or better programmers? [considers state of software industry ...] Uh, never mind.
I expect these sheep in particular are probably vetted for the process and well-handled, and thus less anxious during shearing. It can be, and is accomplished with little fuss. [1] They're also judged on the shearing, I suspect that means the "blanket" directly from the sheep, meaning they really want to have a happy sheep.
Having said that, animal handling done at any large scale always seems awful to me.
Sheep To Shawl Hardcore Edition - it starts *eighteen months* before the day you shear, as you breed the most likely candidates to pick for The Big Day. Six months later lambing, a year after that the contest proper.
> I mean if winning is the thing, then once the sheep is sheered, who cares about the sheep anymore? It's all about the wool and what you do with it.
One of the scoring criteria of the Maryland competition featured here is "Appearance of sheep after shearing". I'd assume judges would not look kindly a sheep covered in blood
You can literally watch a video from the competition at the end of the article, including seeing a portion of a shearing. Fast, and definitely not brutal.
Competitions like these raise interest in small-scale, and thus more humane, sheep-raising, as well as awareness of products from their far more expensive wool.
Not these days it doesn't, because the Wool Marketing Board pays five pence per kilo for wool.
When you compare what you get selling it with the cost of having it collected and graded, and the current price of diesel, it's cheaper to just fire up the JCB, dig a hole, and bury the fucking stuff.
Ha! Exactly what I was thinking when I clicked on the story. Your hands are covered with lanolin just from handling raw wool after shearing. I still have a wool blanket from those days.