Clippers, Scissors & Shears

Sheep shearing, typically just called shearing, is the process by which the woolen fleece of a sheep is removed. The person who removes the sheep's wool is called a shearer. Typically shearing occurs once per year per sheep. more...

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The annual shearing most often occurs in a shearing shed, a facility especially designed to process dozens – or more often hundreds – of sheep per day.

Shearing today

Today, flocks of 4000 or more sheep can only be shorn by large teams of professional shearers working 9-hour days with mechanical shears. Shearers who shear more than 200 sheep per day are known as gun shearers. Typical mass shearing of sheep today follows a well-defined workflow: remove the wool, skirt the fleece, classify the fleece and wool.

Removing the wool

A sheep is caught by the shearer or a specialised "catcher" from the holding pen, possibly herded by a sheep dog. It is then shorn using a mechanical shears (see Shearing devices below). The wool is removed by following an efficient set of movements, devised by Godfrey Bowen (the Bowen Technique). The shearer begins by removing the coarse wool over the sheep's belly, which is separated from the main fleece while the sheep is still being shorn. A professional or "gun" shearer typically removes a fleece without badly marking or cutting the sheep in two to three minutes, depending on the size and condition of the sheep, or less than two in elite competitive shearing. The shorn sheep is released from the floor to another pen; often this involves the sheep being forced down a chute in the floor to the outside, efficiently removing it from the shed.

The CSIRO in Australia has developed a non-mechanical method of shearing sheep using an injected protein that creates a natural break in the wool fibres. After fitting a retaining net to enclose the wool, sheep are injected with the protein. When the net is removed after a week, the fleece has separated and is removed by hand.

Skirting the fleece

Once the entire fleece has been removed from the sheep, the fleece is thrown, clean side down, on to a wool table by a shed hand (commonly known in New Zealand and Australian sheds as a roustabout or rousie). The wool table top consists of rotating steel pins spaced approximately 12cm apart. This enables short pieces of wool, the locks and other debris, to gather beneath the table separately from the fleece. The fleece is then skirted by one or more rouseabouts to remove the sweat tags and other less desirable parts of the fleece. The removed pieces largely consist of sweat-soaked wool and are still useful in industry. As such they are placed in separate containers and sold along with fleece wool. Other items removed from the fleece on the table, such as faeces, skin fragments or twigs and leaves, are discarded a short distance from the wool table so as not to contaminate the wool and fleece.

Read more at Wikipedia.org