Tag Archives: Shearing

Shear hard work

Shearing sheep is harder than it looks

As the weather warms up, it’s sheep shearing time.

Usually, we ask an expert to come round and do it, but this year we thought we’d have a crack at it ourselves. Armed with a set of electric clippers from our indulgent neighbour, we set about the task.

Having rounded up 6 of last years lambs, we managed to manoeuvre them into the shed one by one, positioning them on their backsides (where they can’t move around too easily). Each was clipped in a rather awkward fashion, and then released back into the pack to recover!

The first two seemed to take about an hour each with plenty of resting (us, and the sheep), at which point we decided to retreat and do a bit more research and have a cup of tea! After viewing a couple of online videos of shearing, we decided to have another crack at it. Although the whole sheep+sheers still felt a little alien, we managed to do the other 4 in about 20+ minutes each.

A vast improvement, but exhausting all the same! The others can wait a week or two…