kailthia:

lotrlocked:

tigerheartstales:

talesfromtreatment:

redactedmatopoeia:

O_O that is the largest sheep I have ever seen.

Not sure what I like most about this: the size of the sheep, the strength of both women in getting that ginormous boi into shearing position or how freaking mellow the sheep is.

Mind you, I’d feel pretty good too if I was taking that massive woolly suit off.

Gotta give sheep the hair cut or they can die. She made it look?? So easy??

Reblogging this because I’ve been seeing lots of people saying that sheep-shearing is inhumane or bad. It’s not!

So the more detailed thing is this: domestic sheep have been bred to be very wooly. Very wooly. And they don’t shed their hair in the spring the way a wild sheep would. So it would get too big and it would kill them directly by the weight or indirectly by exposing them to disease or heat prostration or making it too hard to escape an enemy or find food. So shearing them keeps them safer. The sheep is literally getting a haircut. That’s it. The farmers want to keep getting wool from the sheep every year, so they wouldn’t do more to them. 

And as you can see in this video, the shearers take a lot of care to not hurt the sheep. They’re using a fairly standard electric razor, so there’s no huge blades or anything to hurt the sheep. They hold the sheep to keep it still while they work so it won’t struggle and accidentally get hurt - especially around the more delicate areas like the neck/head area and the legs. Adult sheep like this one have had this sort of thing done before so are more used to it. The shearers are working to get it done as safely, quickly, and efficiently as possible.