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.
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[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.[1]
[edit] 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 rouseabout 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.
[edit] Wool classification
Following the skirting of the fleece, it examined for its quality in a process known as wool classing. Often, especially in smaller shearing sheds, the rouseabouts are qualified for this purpose and a separate wool classer is not required. Based on its classification, the fleece is placed into the relevant holding area ready to be mechanically compressed when there is sufficient wool to make a Wool bale.
[edit] Shearing devices
[edit] Blade shears
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 are rarely used today. 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, for those areas where no machinery is available, and more commonly for stud rams. Blade shears are being used in the painting "Shearing the Rams" reproduced below.
[edit] Machine shears
Machine shears operate in a similar manner to human hair-clippers in that a power-driven toothed blade is driven back and forth over the surface of a comb-blade and the wool is cut from the animal. The original machine shears were powered by a fixed hand-crank linked to the handpiece by a shaft with only two universal joints, which afforded a very limited range of motion. Later models have more joints to allow easier positioning of the handpiece on the animal. Electric motors have generally replaced human power for driving the shears. The jointed arm is replaced in many instances with a flexible shaft. Smaller motors allowed the production of shears in which the motor is in the handpiece; these are generally not used by professional shearers as the weight and heat of the motor becomes bothersome with long use.
[edit] 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.
For an inversion, Michael Leunig's Ramming the Shears can be seen as a sign of the shifts in Australian culture, and the extent to which the dominant rural culture is being eroded by an increasingly urban population.
The expression that Australia's wealth rode on the sheeps back in parts of the twentieth century no longer has the currency it once had.
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.
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