Sheep Shearing in Marvão
Photos: Maria Sher Text: Daria
It was 8 am on a Sunday, and there we stood in a postcard-worthy Portuguese village, watching a man put ointment on a sheep’s bum.
Never did I imagine I would do this. I mean all of it: waking at 6:30 after barely sleeping the night, watching the morning light through the branches, walking among the trees and singing birds. All of this in Portugal, with a war happening less than 4 thousand kilometers away.
At the beginning of June we went to what initially seemed like the middle of nowhere, but turned out to be a wonderful place full of trees, grazing horses, and highly active allergens — Marvão. We came to see sheep shearing – a process that is necessary for the domesticated sheep since they don’t shed naturally, but can be very painful for the animals, especially in highly industrialized wool production.
One of the most cruel practices in sheep shearing is mulesing. It is the process of cutting off pieces of flesh from the sheep’s behinds. Why? To make the work easier for humans. If there’s no wool on the sheep’s bum, it won’t collect feces and pee. In return, mulesing leaves the animals with gashing wounds around their tails that attract even more flies, get infected, and make the sheep suffer.
In Portugal, however, mulesing is not practiced. What we saw instead was a rather gentle process, with every accidental cut being treated with ointments and great care. And the cuts we did see were few and small, no more than a nick you might get while shaving.
The shearing we witnessed was a mix of craft and skillful labor done by a family of father and son. To shear a sheep, you need patience, precision, and a lot of experience. You also need physical strength, because it takes at least two strong people to take a sheep from among its siblings and position it for shearing, and to hold the animal during the process.
But shearing also requires gentleness and understanding a sheep’s needs: what position would allow the shearer to work while not making the sheep uncomfortable? How does one do a close shave without cutting the animal? How can you finish the job as quickly and efficiently as possible before exhausting the animal’s saintly patience?
Even today, shearing is oftentimes done using humble wool clippers. You start from the belly avoiding the nipples, carefully shave around the crotch so as not to hurt the animal, do the legs, chest, and neck, and finish with the biggest part of the fleece, which is on the sheep’s back. As soon as the sheep is done with, it runs away into the field. Or sometimes into the opposite direction. Or back to its siblings, baaing and fumbling, its legs tangling in the wire. I really want to say that sheep are majestic gentle creatures, but no. They are dumb, chaotic disasters. So there’s no knowing really where one might run as soon as the shearer is done.
A couple of them escaped happily before being sheared. Which was lucky because we got to see the sheepdogs at work.
Peter, the farmer who owns this particular flock, has been living in Marvão for a while now. While very young and still in the UK, a Scottish shepherd taught him how to raise shepherd dogs. Peter brought this knowledge (and a dog) with him to Portugal. And the dogs he raised are indeed majestic. They are bubbly and friendly and want to do the job and lick your hands and sniff the sheep and run around and whip their tails back and forth as if saying, “OH MY GOODNESS THE SHEEP THE WEATHER THE GRASS I’M GONNA ROLL IN THE GRASS AND BARK AT THE WATER AND THIS IS THE BEST LIFE I CAN IMAGINE!”
So basically, they are very good dogs.
Peter guided his hairy helpers using a few seemingly random words. The dogs (Tweed, Zara, and Mel – Honey in Portuguese) were dashing around the sheep directing them home. They got me wondering if they really knew what they were doing. What if all they know is, “running around sheep = good,” and they want to do a good job? What’s going on inside a dog’s brain?
Afterwards the dogs drank water heavily, not so much lapping as biting gulps out of it, and stretched on the ground under the trees, proud and content.
A good fleece is a continuous piece of a sheep’s coat. The woman who invited us to see the shearing was the one buying the fleeces, bringing them to a mill to be processed, and then dyeing the yarn at home. She took each fleece and threw it on the table to pick out any pieces that were wet (mostly from the sheep’s bum), then rolled them up and put them into a big bag. Sheep coats in the bag were a motley of chocolate brown, with honey, cinnamon, and black mixed in — heavy, wavy, soft, and smelling (unsurprisingly) like wool.
Peter says the black merino sheep that he has is an old breed. Much older than the white ones we think about when we think about sheep. But since you cannot really dye black wool without damaging the fiber, and humans wanted beautifully dyed fabrics, white sheep surged in popularity while the ancient merino fell out of favor. Among Peter’s black herd, there was however one white sheep. It was born to black parents, and is only white because of accidental albino mutation.
(A white sheep being the “black sheep” of an all-dark flock — the irony was not lost on us.)
We weren’t the only people at the shearing. There are rental cottages all around the farm, and some of the guests keep visiting year after year. One of them, after five minutes of small talk, asked me if I was the photographer’s assistant.
No, I said. I’m the wife.
Photos: Maria Sher
Text: Daria
