#and since my lamb has a docked tail for a specific reason

[olrinarts]

Day 10: Bishop's Relic, with bonus short featuring sheep lore and a very nervous Lamb

[why-am-i-even-on-here]

As someone who has spent my entire life from the age of ten onwards living and working on a sheep farm, I’d like to add something about shearing:

As the person above said, not shearing sheep leads to a massively increased risk of flystrike - and the sheep will be eaten alive by the maggots. I’ve dealt with dozens of minor cases of flystrike, and one serious case, where the ram in question had been so badly infected that his entire right side was one big gaping hole where the maggots had eaten away all the flesh. He survived- miraculously, since usually a wound like that would kill a sheep - but only because myself, two other farmers and two vets spent days caring for him intensively. (He’s still got a massive scar and is functionally useless to us, but we still care for him and just use him as a companion for the other rams). Also, those who have a problem with docking sheep’s tails, if we don’t dock the tails then dung can become caked around that area, causing - you guessed it - more flystrike (also we dock the tails with an elastic band - it will ache for a few hours until the lamb loses sensation in their tail, and then after about a week the tail just drops off. The lambs barely notice).

The other risk of not shearing sheep is death by heatstroke. Of sheep aren’t shorn, they will grow layer upon layer of wool, year after year, until they might have up to 80 or so kilos of wool (that’s around the weight of a ewe - a sheep could potentially end up carrying their own weight in wool) until they get so hot during the summer inside all that wool that they collapse and die of overheating. This is not just a risk like flystrike - it’s a certainty. Don’t shear your sheep for a few years, and those sheep will die.

And yes, there are a few breeds of sheep (such as Wiltshire Horns) that shed their wool and don’t require shearing. However, the only useful product that those sheep can be farmed for is meat. And sheep don’t really exist in the wild. So if we don’t farm any sheep at all, they will become extinct. In fact, Wiltshire Horns did nearly become extinct, because there wasn’t much of a market for mutton, so farmers just didn’t keep them. The only reason they survived is because in the 70s Wiltshires were designated a rare breed and farmed specifically to conserve the breed, but to survive in this capitalist world, those farmers still have to turn a profit.

Now if you are against farming due to inhumane practices such as battery farming, using wool shouldn’t be a problem, because it is impossible to get useable wool from battery-farmed sheep. And even with sheep farmed for meat, battery farming is relatively rare, since sheep are ideal for farming on land that is useless for other farming (because it is infertile or inaccessible to machinery), such as many upland areas in places like Scotland, Wales and New Zealand.

If you want to take a stand against inhumane conditions that farm animals suffer under, cattle, poultry and in some countries pigs are often kept in battery farms, which have horrendous conditions. Direct your anger at that and help convince governments to place restrictions on battery farming.

I understand why people dislike leather and animal products. But leather is such a good resource? Like… My mom bought a sturdy leather coat in 1989. I’m in my 20’s and I now wear that coat. That’s a 30 year old coat? 30 years, two generations, one coat. Versus, like… A plastic one, that rips and gets thrown out, or releases bits into the ecosystem every time it’s washed, takes a billion years to decompose, lasts maybe a decade if you’re super duper careful, and uses oil products in it’s construction. Like, yeah leather is expensive and comes from a living animal, and I’m not saying that you should go out and buy fifty fur and leather products for the he’ll of it, but like… Maybe the compromise is worth it? One animal product, valued and respected and worn down for generations, versus like… Six plastic products that will never ever go away?

idk, I could be wrong.