In a Sheep to Shawl competition, you have 5 people, 1 sheep, and 3 hours | Hacker News Reader

In a Sheep to Shawl competition, you have 5 people, 1 sheep, and 3 hours

npr.org

142 pointszdw50 comments

>Because the competitors are spinning wool that hasn't been processed, it still has lanolin in it. This makes the wool greasier and more difficult to spin, so the ideal is finding a sheep with less lanolin to begin with.

Ha! Exactly what I was thinking when I clicked on the story. Your hands are covered with lanolin just from handling raw wool after shearing. I still have a wool blanket from those days.

I wonder if it's possible to wash the sheep with a shampoo or something before the competition.

The lanolin helps lubricate the shearing blades, and you need to be very careful washing wool so it doesn’t felt. Show sheep get shampooed but their fleeces are trimmed short first.

*Everything* is covered in lanolin when you're shearing.

I used to wear my scruffiest most ripped zip burst no buttons tied around my waist with string jeans while shearing (in particular while bringing sheep out from the pens to be shorn). I'd wear them for the whole week we were shearing, and then just burn them. There's no way you're rehabilitating anything you wore that week into an item of clothing you can wear in public.

But wouldn't they be exceptionally waterproof after that? Or is the smell also impossible to get rid of?

They are spectacularly waterproof, spectacularly inflammable, and spectacularly stinky.

Wait, so sheep are extremely flammable?

(Now imagining the spectacle of fiery sheep-comets, launched by trebuchet, flying over castle walls.)

No, but lanolin soaked into cotton is.

I never thought I would find sheep shearing or weaving interesting but this is a really cool article (and contest). It’s really cool to see how people can perfect these somewhat anachronistic skills and even optimize them to accomplish a task in hours that usually takes much longer.

Spinning yarn is one of those things that just catches my fascination. I have a friend that is an avid knitter, and spinning yarn is the next thing she wants to get into. In the style of those social media fads of creating your team of friends to survive the zombie apocalypse together, she always comments on how people want friends with guns or medical experience. She always says "but i can make clothing out of string!" which might come in handy

My wife has always crocheted, and she learned to spin during the pandemic. Then she got a blending board and started making her own blends. Now she’s gotten into dyeing, having just finished her first attempt. She’s already thinking about getting a drum carder to make her own roving.

It’s pretty tempting to go deep, and every step back in the process can add fun!

> "but i can make clothing out of string!"

Making cordage is one of the most underrated long-term survival skills out there. Finding good sources of fiber is the first step.

My wife (who spins and knits) has a number of acquaintances who engage in sheep-to-shawl competitively. They're all uber-geeks of the textile world.

It's just like those build-a-game-from-scratch-in-a-weekend contests. Except for the sheep.

My friends mom attended this. She mentioned that the wool that was used in the later stages was dyed and clearly wasn’t the same wool they sheared at the beginning. Still a cool concept.

While a little disappointing at first, after thinking about it I suppose they have to use the dyed stuff instead. Otherwise they won't be able to get the impressive patterns and artwork that are part of the point of the competition.

From the video in the article, the warp and pattern are preset on the loom by each team and they use the shorn wool for the weft.

Sheep shearing is brutal for the sheep, at least in a commercial setting where time is money. They take half the sheep's skin off too.

No it's not. No it doesn't. You're just making that up.

If you want to make an extraordinary claim, provide evidence.

They aren't making it up, but ar propogating a lie they've seen elsewhere

A lie, really? Check yourself.

https://www.woolfacts.com/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/16/secret-v...

https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/horrific-footage-e...

https://www.thestatesman.com/supplements/8thday/the-violent-...

My family raised sheep for like 10 years...

I had no "sheep knowledge" before some quick googling...

They are not making it up, extreme gratuitous cruelty has been documented in commercial sheep shearing if you care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCeKbMRlJUU

That video link was from:

https://www.woolfacts.com/wool-and-animal-welfare/shearing/

That article goes on to state that the same investigators uncovered cruelty at 117 separate operations, so does not appear to be an isolated incident by, "a few bad apples".

This has nothing to do with a homespun wool contest. This isn’t a commercial setting.

As your link mentions, these sheep have been selectively bred to require shearing.

Actually no, the fact that you can shear sheep comes out of the fact that sheep have evolved to shed their wool.

When it gets into warmer weather and it's time to shear them, their wool starts to thin, and you get a "rise" - a layer about 5-8mm deep where the individual hairs are about half of their normal thickness. In the wild, these hairs would break and the sheep would shed all its wool in great chunks, but it also makes it a lot easier to shear.

If you've tried cutting the "normal" fleece with hand shears you'll know how hard it is, and it will absolutely destroy mechanical clippers.

That's not to say that sheep haven't been selectively bred to have a good rise, as well as other desirable characteristics - it's not dog breeding, no-one is trying to select for a deformed snuffly nose to please a dog show judge - but the rise was there before they were domesticated, or they likely wouldn't have survived.

They have been selectively bred to produce much more wool than is natural, for human benefit. Their ancestors did not require shearing by humans to survive. If you believe otherwise you're an idiot.

Not really, no. If you look at wild sheep, you'll see they do just the very same thing.

Scottish Blackface are about as close to wild as you can get, and they're famed for their wool.

There are over a hundred thousand sheep farms in the US alone. That's 117 in 6 countries, what percentage of farms had bad practices and how were the ones that were audited chosen?

Given that this is PETA, I would not assume good faith here.

Finally, the original poster makes a universal claim about the nature of sheep farming, which your above anecdotes do nothing to support.

head in sand time

> “Imagine if someone attacked you after … you’d been starved for 24 hours – you wouldn’t have much of a fight.”

Actually, I would. 24 hours isn't that long. Adrenaline is a helluva drug.

Brutal video, though. Ugh.

Ah yes, that video. It was staged.

We had one similar in the UK a couple of years back, where a couple of "animal rights activists" got themselves hired at a farm to "document animal cruelty". Not finding any, they set about abusing some animals so they could film it.

I think they're still in prison just now, actually.

Funny that you are not being asked to provide evidence for your extreme claim- everyone just upvotes because it makes them feel better about their life choices again.

Come on, where's the evidence it was staged. where is any evidence whatsoever for your claims?

Here's some more evidence to support my claims:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/16/secret-v...

https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/horrific-footage-e...

https://www.thestatesman.com/supplements/8thday/the-violent-...

Three tabloid newspapers of the "Freddy Starr Ate My Hamster" degree of believability.

Okay then.

sillystuff provided the evidence for me, so no I'm not making it up. ha ha bad luck old chum. Yes your wool sweaters are cruel.

Though a bit over the top in claims, I'd agree that yes, injury to the sheep is probably to be expected at some level.

From the following...

https://kb.rspca.org.au/knowledge-base/what-are-the-animal-w...

...there is this quote...

"nicks and cuts may occur if the sheep does struggle, or has excessively wrinkled skin or the shearer is distracted or under time pressure"

Time pressure - exactly what such a competition would encourage. I'm not saying it happens, but the urge to hurry could certainly lead to such a thing.

I mean if winning is the thing, then once the sheep is sheered, who cares about the sheep anymore? It's all about the wool and what you do with it. In 3 hours.

I expect these sheep in particular are probably vetted for the process and well-handled, and thus less anxious during shearing. It can be, and is accomplished with little fuss. [1] They're also judged on the shearing, I suspect that means the "blanket" directly from the sheep, meaning they really want to have a happy sheep.

Having said that, animal handling done at any large scale always seems awful to me.

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/@rightchoiceshearing/videos

Sheep To Shawl Hardcore Edition - it starts *eighteen months* before the day you shear, as you breed the most likely candidates to pick for The Big Day. Six months later lambing, a year after that the contest proper.

You can literally watch a video from the competition at the end of the article, including seeing a portion of a shearing. Fast, and definitely not brutal.

Competitions like these raise interest in small-scale, and thus more humane, sheep-raising, as well as awareness of products from their far more expensive wool.

Asked a former champion shearer, who said that maybe 1% of sheep being sheared get nicked, more likely by inexperienced shearers. If the skin is not held taut, nicks will happen. For people who shave their faces with a blade, how often do you nick yourself? Saying "half the sheep's skin" is a ludicrous claim. It's not like skinning mink - you want the animal to survive the process!

lol, you reckon most commercial mass scale sheep farmers hire world champion sheep shearers?

Not world, just state. It is a skill where both speed and quality benefit the employer. Would a software company prefer programmers who produce buggy code slowly, or better programmers? [considers state of software industry ...] Uh, never mind.

> I mean if winning is the thing, then once the sheep is sheered, who cares about the sheep anymore? It's all about the wool and what you do with it.

One of the scoring criteria of the Maryland competition featured here is "Appearance of sheep after shearing". I'd assume judges would not look kindly a sheep covered in blood

The farmer.

No-one wants animals getting injured and no-one wants sheep looking like a mangy floor mop when they're done.

Yeah, cause this looks just like a commercial setting <facepalm>

Shearing competitions are pretty common in the world of 4H or other groups for kids. Of course, the animals they are shearing are raised by the kids and they are basically family pets the way they are pampered. Trying to knock what people are doing because of some random holier than though position is just lame

It promotes sheep shearing and wool, so not lame to knock it. GFY.

Maybe it’s propaganda, but the excellent show “Clarkson’s Farm” has sheep shearing in it. It seems good enough to the animals.

Clarkson's Farm is a pretty honest depiction of what it's like for small-to-medium scale farmers in the UK.

Except the bit where he made 140 quid profit, most folk make anything like as much as that.

99% of the world's wool doesn't come from small to medium farms.

Not these days it doesn't, because the Wool Marketing Board pays five pence per kilo for wool.

When you compare what you get selling it with the cost of having it collected and graded, and the current price of diesel, it's cheaper to just fire up the JCB, dig a hole, and bury the fucking stuff.

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