Sheep’s Shear Misery Is Students’ Sheer Fun

The sheep didn’t enjoy it much, but the kids loved it.

The Santa Ana Zoo’s annual Sheepshearing Festival drew about 2,200 schoolchildren from Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties Tuesday to watch sheep lose their winter coats.

Sheep need to shed 15 to 20 pounds of wool so that they can stay cool during the summer months. So for 14 years the zoo has been using the ritual to teach urban youngsters a lesson about farm animals.

“Children today are so removed from where they get things from,” said Kent M. Yamaguchi, the zoo’s curator of education. “Milk comes in cartons. Eggs come in trays.”

As groups of schoolchildren sat in front of a portable stage normally reserved for civic events, professionals sheared a different sheep every half-hour for a total of seven sheep. They included Hannibal, a 150-pound, black-haired Karakul sheep, and Godzilla, a 300-pound, white-haired Suffolk.

Shearer Bram Verheul of Pomona used oversized clippers similar to those used by barbers, although his was hooked up to a one-half-horsepower motor.

Announcer Don Paulson explained the art of sheep-shearing, which includes starting at the stomach, then moving to the hind legs and over the rest of the body. Sometimes the wool is so thick a shearer cannot see the clippers and must feel his way around the sheep. And sometimes the sheep get nicked.

While the cuts are rare, sheep don’t enjoy getting sheared, said zoo animal keeper Elta Chapman. “They get nervous. They’re being tossed.”

After the demonstration, children walked by a pen to touch the newly shorn animals.

“It felt like a soft brush,” observed one youngster.

Children then walked past artisans, who used wooden wheels to spin tufts of wool and cotton into yarn.

Seven-year-old Paige Otterbein who now knew where the wool had come from, wondered about the cotton.

“What I don’t get,” said the first-grader at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic School in Newport Beach, “is how you grow cotton. You just put a seed in the ground?”