Sheep shearing
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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. 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.Removing the wool
A sheep is caught by the shearer or a specialised "catcher" from the holding pen. 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 can remove the entire fleece without badly marking or cutting the sheep in less than five minutes. 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 vaccinated with the protein. When the net is removed after a week, the fleece has separated and is removed by hand.[link]
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.
Wool classification
Main article: Wool classingFollowing the skirting of the fleece, it is rolled up and examined for its quality in a process known as wool classing. Often, especially in smaller shearing sheds, the roustabouts are qualified for this purpose and a separate wool classer is not required. Based on its classification, the fleece is placed into the relevant bale (or bag) ready to be mechanically compressed when there is sufficient wool to make a bale.
Shearing devices
Blade shears consist of two blades arranged similarly to scissors except that the hinge is at the end farthest from the point (not in the middle). The cutting edges pass each other as the shearer squeezes them together and shear the wool close to the animal's skin. A drawing of these shears is part of the logo on [this page]. Blade shears leave a lot of wool on a sheep and are suitable for cold climates where the sheep needs to keep some protection from the elements, and for those areas where no machinery is available.Machine shears operate in a similar manner to human hair-clippers in that a power-driven toothed blade is driven over the surface of a comb-blade and the wool is cut from the animal. The handpiece of mechanical shears is attached to a steel arm with universally rotating joints for maximum manoeuvrability.
Shearing culture
A culture has evolved out of the practice of sheep shearing, especially in post-colonial Australia and New Zealand. Shearing the Rams, a painting by Australian impressionist painter Tom Roberts is considered to be iconic of the livestock-growing culture or "life on the land" in Australia.
Many Sheep stations across Australia no longer carry sheep due to lower wool prices, drought and other disasters, but their Shearing sheds remain, in a wide variety of materials and styles, and have been the subject of books and documentation for heritage authorities. Some farmers are reluctant to remove either the equipment or the sheds, and many unused sheds remain intact.
See also
References
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