78 Pounds of Wool Were Shorn From This Sheep

One of the benefits of being a domesticated sheep is having your wool shorn annually. This annual shearing helps the sheep stay healthy, as having overgrown wool makes it prone to injury and infections. For domesticated sheep that no longer have owners, their wool just keeps on growing unchecked, because there is no one to shear it for them. Such is the case for Baarack.

He hadn't been shorn in years, and his fleece had grown into a dense, gargantuan mass by the time he was captured and brought to Edgar's Mission Farm Sanctuary for rescued farm animals in Lancefield, Victoria, a representative of the nonprofit told Live Science in an email.

When Baarack’s wool was finally shorn, it was said that his wool weighed about as much as a ten-year-old child.

At one point in the past, Baarack had an owner, as he had been castrated and mulesed — a practice that removes skin from around a sheep's tail, creating smooth scar tissue that deters blowflies, according to Australia's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). His ears also showed signs of tagging, though the tags were long gone, possibly torn out by the weight of his overgrown coat, according to Edgar's Mission.

Photos of Baarack before his haircut show the sheep's muzzle poking out of an enormous and very crusty wool cocoon. When the sheep was standing, only his hooves and a small section of his lower legs were visible; when he lay down, his legs disappeared entirely.

The load of wool around his head was so heavy that it partly hid his face, and the fleece's weight pulled on his lower eyelids, exposing his eyes to grit and dust. He had a painful ulcer in one eye from a stuck grass seed, according to the mission representative.

Now he’s free of that woolly burden.

(Image Credit: Edgar’s Mission/ Live Science)