Saturday 4 June 2011

Sheep Shearing Videos

Although I can't tell you too much here about the sheep shearing course I did, I can show you some videos of the instructor.  After all, you can't print a video!  The instructor was Phil Hart, a Gold Seal shearer, Wool Board Shearing Instructor and Competition Judge.  He stars in seven videos made by FarmingAds about sheep shearing.  I just hope I manage to embed the videos OK, I'm not that good with all this technical stuff!

In this video Phil demonstrates how to dag and shear a sheep.  See this lively Suffolk Mule do a handstand!




This is my favourite film.  In this film Phil takes a sheep he has already shorn and 'shears' it with a wax crayon so that you can see the shearing pattern without all the wool in the way:


Apparently on one course Phil did this with a red crayon.  Later, once the sheep had been turned out in the field, the farm had a visit from the RSPCA, someone had reported the shearers had slashed a sheep to bits!  Now Phil never does this exercise with a red crayon.

If you feel inspired to try sheep shearing I strongly suggest you go on a proper course, sheep shearing is not something you can learn from scratch by watching a YouTube video.


4 comments:

  1. Great post! Very informative. Nice to see exactly what's happening; it's hard to tell when it's happening so quickly!

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  2. What great videos to share. It's always nice to know where the fiber comes from that I use.

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  3. Thank you! I love the wax crayon video, the pattern is very precise and you're right, it's hard to see what is actually happening when the shearer is working fast.

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  4. I'm amazed! I've never seen a sheep sheared so thank you for sharing this. Wow!

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