Shear Terror:

Wool Shearing is performed in the Spring, after lambing, just before the Sheep would naturally begin shedding their thick winter coats in preparation for summer. The wool provides a living Sheep with the perfect temperature regulation at each season, until humans take it all away in Spring, then the Sheep are truly cold, due to their higher body temperature (102 degrees F) for a month or two until Summer arrives.

The modern, industrialized shearing process can be traumatic for the sheep, and shearers are usually paid by volume which does not foster ethical treatment of the animals during this process. Skin abrasions, cuts and even worse are commonplace among newly shorn conventionally raised sheep.

Organic farmers treat their flock with much more consideration, and rarely harm the animals at all during the shearing process. More gentle and educated treatment of sheep, result in a happy, contented flock of sheep instead of a frightened and injured one.

Shorn wool is sorted by it's thickness and coarseness into various classes before being baled and sent to a processing facility for washing, combing, dyeing, spinning, carding, and felting.

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