Sheep have a delightful ability to teach me—their shearer—how wrong I am about certain things, and what those things are. This includes the timing and seasonality of shearing and, specifically, why some shepherds shear their flocks in rainy or cold winter weather.
Initially it seems cruel or inhumane. I have heard, more than once, about animal control calling shepherds to say, “Heads up, someone complained about your naked sheep.” A partial shearing called crutching makes sense: we shear the sheep’s belly and backside, cleaning up the areas where ewes will deliver lambs that will nurse, and leave the wool on their backs. But a full shear with winter coming on?
It can’t be inhumane, though. That doesn’t make sense. Shepherds do everything they can to make their flocks’ lives better. No good shepherd—in my experience, 99% of them—would do anything to jeopardize the health, comfort, safety, longevity, and happiness of their sheep.
Shearer Katherine Moser pauses with a freshly sheared Merino ewe in Newell, South Dakota.
So why would someone ask me to shear their sheep in winter or, more typically, in late autumn just ahead of winter, especially if it’s raining? Many of the sheared sheep do have barns in which to cozy up, and some breeds (such as Icelandics and Navajo-Churros) get sheared twice per year. Even so, shouldn’t we leave the wool on until warmer, drier weather arrives later in spring? After all, wool is warm even when wet. We can just leave it on!
The sheep have changed my mind. (But first, one caveat: When it comes to sheep, there are no rules, only contexts.)
Wet wool is warm, but is it comfortable?
Sheep have a delightful ability to teach me—their shearer—how wrong I am about certain things, and what those things are. This includes the timing and seasonality of shearing and, specifically, why some shepherds shear their flocks in rainy or cold winter weather.
Initially it seems cruel or inhumane. I have heard, more than once, about animal control calling shepherds to say, “Heads up, someone complained about your naked sheep.” A partial shearing called crutching makes sense: we shear the sheep’s belly and backside, cleaning up the areas where ewes will deliver lambs that will nurse, and leave the wool on their backs. But a full shear with winter coming on?
It can’t be inhumane, though. That doesn’t make sense. Shepherds do everything they can to make their flocks’ lives better. No good shepherd—in my experience, 99% of them—would do anything to jeopardize the health, comfort, safety, longevity, and happiness of their sheep.
Shearer Katherine Moser pauses with a freshly sheared Merino ewe in Newell, South Dakota.
So why would someone ask me to shear their sheep in winter or, more typically, in late autumn just ahead of winter, especially if it’s raining? Many of the sheared sheep do have barns in which to cozy up, and some breeds (such as Icelandics and Navajo-Churros) get sheared twice per year. Even so, shouldn’t we leave the wool on until warmer, drier weather arrives later in spring? After all, wool is warm even when wet. We can just leave it on!
The sheep have changed my mind. (But first, one caveat: When it comes to sheep, there are no rules, only contexts.)
Wet wool is warm, but is it comfortable? [PAYWALL]
Yes, wool is warm when wet. That doesn’t mean it’s comfortable in warm, soaking-wet-sweater form. When I first started shearing, one of the biggest surprises was how heavy a single raw fleece can be, laden with lanolin (oil): 10–20 pounds. Wool can hold 40% of its weight in water on top of that. For a 12-pound fleece, then, water adds almost 5 additional pounds—nearly half the weight of the fleece the sheep was already carrying, from a single heavy rainstorm. All together, 17 pounds is a lot of weight for a 100- to 120-pound sheep to carry around.
If the weather stays wet, without the aid of sunny days and wind to dry the fleece out, then the fleece stays wet. In a wet season, the sheep may walk around in this heavy-sodden-sweater state for weeks or months. And when they do, sheep look about as miserable as you might expect.
Easier to Read Health
After shearing, sheep immediately feel lighter and cooler, some literally bouncing, 10–12 pounds lifted from their bodies in 10–12 minutes, fresh air gracing their skin. As one customer put it, with heavy, wet wool out of the picture, a sheared sheep “acts more like its typical self, whatever that is. And that makes it easier for me to tell who really has something going on, and might be sick, versus a bunch of them dragging around because they’ve got heavy, wet wool on.” Having the wool off also enables folks to identify other health issues like abscesses, tumors, and hernias more easily.
The first early lamb born in Winnemucca, Nevada.
Lambing Time Sets the Clock
Lambing drives shearing time. No matter what time of year lambing takes place, we shear well ahead of it. Shearing is done for lamb health. It’s easier for lambs to find an udder without wool in the way, and that udder area is cleaner with manure-laden wool gone.
The general recommendation is to shear 14 to 7 weeks before the due date. Why? Shearing is an unusual, stressful experience for sheep. Prey animals do not enjoy humans catching and handling them. We don’t want to stress ewes and send them into early labor, and nobody wants to lose a lamb. If we shear too close to lambing, a pregnant ewe can suffer from the extra stresses (thermal, physical, nutritional) that shearing can bring.
Stress Shows Up in Wool
There’s a fiber component, too.
You can’t treat sheep badly (not for long, anyway) and get good wool. Stress, nutritional and mineral deficiencies, and other issues show up in wool as lines or breaks. Lambing is one such stress. We don’t want birth fluids mixed in with the wool, and a lactating ewe puts energy toward milk production—lamb survival—over wool production, which creates a weak spot in the fleece.
This is why, if we shear after lambing rather than before, we’ll often see a tender spot or break in the wool. The wool staple can break into two shorter lengths, each of which may be too short to meet the 3” minimum fiber length most wool mill equipment requires. The wool has lost quality and a lot of value; it is borderline worthless—and that is a tragedy for otherwise gorgeous, fine, long-staple wool. If the weakness is on the outer end of a wool staple, by contrast, the overall fleece is stronger and more valuable.
Some vegetable matter may fall out during skirting, but when seeds and weeds get lodged in fleece, they can be very difficult to dislodge.
Supplementary Feed and Vegetable Matter
Vegetable matter, or VM, is all of the plant life that can show up in wool: seeds, stickers and pickers and burrs, hay and straw. An easy solution is to time shearing so the sheep do not have enough wool for VM to stick in. We shear to precede the arrival of picky foxtails, certain grasses going to seed, or cockleburrs, which show up in wet years. Not only do certain kinds of VM make for miserable shearing (burrs ripping our arms to bleeding, for instance), but they reduce the fleece quality as well.
And that’s just VM from grazing. In winter, pastures can be snow-covered, too muddy to graze responsibly, or so wet that sheep develop hoof rot. Farmers stockpile their barns with winter feed, and that feed, such as short stalks of alfalfa hay, can stick in fleeces, especially in the head and neck area—what shearers call a crow’s nest.
Some VM can be skirted out and fall onto the floor, or scoured out down the line, but a lot of VM cannot be. The fleece isn’t as clean as it could be, which reduces wool value. And, if the remaining VM can’t be carbonized out at the mill (an energy-intensive and not exactly eco-friendly process), it ends up in yarn as things that can poke and irritate us. It’s not only coarse wool that is scratchy; sometimes it’s the lingering bits of straw and foxtails.
A Merino ewe awaits her turn to be sheared in Newell, South Dakota, one of the capitals for fine wool in the United States.
Trust Animal Wisdom
With climate shifts, winter in many regions is beginning to look more like early spring, and sheep behavior shifts, too. More winter moisture comes as rain, not snow, and grass comes up with the first rains. Grass seeds waiting in the soil don’t need much to get going, and I am always astonished at how one small rain flushes a landscape with a wash of green. It may be out of season, but whenever it comes, grass gives lambs and their moms excellent, fresh feed, and sheep usually choose fresh green grass over barns packed to the rafters with winter feed. Most sheep don’t eat like goats, which will chow down on thorny blackberry, small trees, broomsticks, and fence. I’ve learned a lot by simply watching what sheep choose to do. They could be in the barn, cozy under cover, feasting upon many tons of hay, and they’re out in the rain, grazing grass. We may worry about them out in the weather, but they know to find shelter if they need it.
Animals are place-based. Sheep show us their preferences—often strongly—and have their own wisdom. We may not always understand it, especially when the wisdom looks like racing out of a warm barn during a rainstorm to birth lambs in a wet field, but it’s there.
Stephany Wilkes is a sheep shearer and wool classer based in Northern California. Her 2018 book Raw Material: Working Wool in the West details her up close experiences in the fiber world. Find her online at her website or on instagram as ladysheepshearer. She was interviewed on the Long Thread Podcast in 2023.
