Holy sheep! That’s tougher than it looks!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/06/2016 (3606 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a muggy Saturday afternoon at the Red River Ex and I’m standing in a steel pen on the fair grounds with dozens of curious spectators looking on and an extremely nervous sheep clenched tightly between my thighs.

I should probably explain. The thing is, if you happen to be a humour columnist at a major provincial newspaper and the organizers of a fair invite you to take part in a sheep-shearing demonstration, you are contractually obligated to say “yes.”

Over the years, I have been talked into doing a lot of potentially lethal activities at the Ex, such as rating the scariest thrill rides and eating deep-fried foods that could meet the carbohydrate needs of a developing nation for an entire year.

A few years ago, I even agreed to crawl along the top of a 7,000-gallon saltwater tank and, using a long steel claw, feed fish chunks to five sharks, including one that was the size of a nuclear submarine, only with more teeth.

So this weekend I decided to try something less hazardous, which is where sheep shearing came in. In my mind, I imagined a soft-spoken grandmother with a handful of herbivores she’d borrowed from Little Bo Beep, and we would gently snip away at their fleece using those plastic safety scissors they gave out in kindergarten.

As it turns out, I was a fool. In reality, when I showed up at the Ex, I was greeted by Stacey Rosvold, a 30-year-old sheep rancher who looks like a fitness model and sports mirrored aviation sunglasses and a pair of toned, muscular arms that would make any CrossFit fanatic green with envy.

After sizing me up as I stood there, perspiring heavily in my plaid Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, Stacey pointed out that sheep shearing is far more physically demanding than most people realize.

“You need good leg muscles,” said Stacey, who has been honing her skills for the past five years on a sheep-cattle ranch she runs with her husband, Steven, about 45 minutes north of Dauphin. “Most of it is with your legs. Try being bent over like this for 12 hours a day. Once you get them flipped over, you’re good.”

Thinking back to my experience feeding sharks, the first question I asked was whether sheep tend to bite. After an uncomfortably long pause, Stacey said with a chuckle: “I have had one nibble the back of my arm. They don’t mean to do it.”

With a crowd of corndog-gnawing, stuffed toy-toting spectators looking on, Stacey, armed with an industrial-strength electric steel razor dangling from a cable the thickness of a garden hose, walked us through the basic steps of Sheep Shearing 101:

(For the record, the sheep enjoy this process. Stacey said it would be cruel to let them wander around in the summer heat wearing heavy wool sweaters.)

1) Tip the sheep over by grabbing its nose and bending its head to one side;

‘Most of it is with your legs. Try being bent over like this for 12 hours a day. Once you get them flipped over, you’re good’– Stacey Rosvold, a veteran sheep rancher

2) Hoist the sheep into a sitting position and secure it firmly between your legs. “This is a very comfortable position for sheep,” Stacey chirped. “They’ll sit there very nicely.”

3) Start shearing the belly and the, um, nether regions, then toss that wool away because it is coated in hay and sheep poop. “You do not want that in your socks,” Stacey advised.

4) Important Safety Tip: Those shears are (bad word) sharp. “It will take the tip of your finger off. I’ve done that. It’s not fun.”

5) Shear the back legs, pushing the wool away with your free hand, then roll the sheep onto its right side and shave the left side from the bottom up;

6) Sit the sheep up again, shave around the neck, then move down the right side to the butt and — Zip! Zap! Zip! — you’re done.

Piece of cake, right? When it’s all over, Stacey literally rolled the sheep out of its fleece the way you would roll a fish out of its skin. “In the end,” she noted, “the wool will be all in one piece. It looks like a blanket, like a sheep on the floor.”

Which is when she ushered me into the steel pen to give it a go. In all honesty, this was possibly the most challenging activity I have ever tried in my life. For starters, you have no idea how hard it is to tip over a nervous sheep.

Once it was sitting up between my legs, I forgot all of Stacey’s tips and timidly dabbed at the sheep with the electric shears, literally terrified of the idea that I would accidentally send its vital organs flying into the crowd. Stacey calmly assured me I wasn’t going to hurt the sheep, but I proved even less skilled at giving a woolly ruminant a haircut than I was at ballroom dancing, if you can imagine.

After about four agonizing minutes, knees and back exhausted, I admitted defeat.

“On average, it takes me about four minutes to shear a sheep,” Stacey told me. “But my first one took half an hour. It’s hard work. Which is why not a lot of people do it. You should stick with journalism, Doug, unless you’re going to be around a lot of sheep.”

I can tell you first-hand that Stacey is not kidding. She doesn’t do this to get rich; she does it to keep both the sheep and herself healthy. In fact, shearing might just be the next workout craze to sweep the nation.

“When you do this in the heat, it’s a lot like hot yoga — you contort yourself into funny positions and you sweat a lot,” Stacey said, beaming.

I’ve got the sweating part down pat, but in the future, I think I’ll stick to feeding sharks.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca