Falling wool prices are pushing farmers towards naturally shedding sheep as they ditch the material - exposing holes in their argument that shearing the animals was always motivated by concern for the animals.

Farmers are switching to naturally shedding sheep breeds in an attempt to curb shearing costs amid the plummeting price of wool, according to a recent report by the Guardian.

Among the reasons cited for the price decline, was the growth in synthetic fibres. Another key factor was the Covid pandemic, which saw wool prices fall from 60p in 2019 to just 32p by July 2020.

While that number is creeping back up, according to marketing industry body British Wool, which collects and sells British wool to the international wool textile industry, it is 'still not where [they] would like it to be'.

In fact, the returns are so poor that some farmers have been composting their yield or sending it to landfill in quantities so significant that Glencroft, a country wear clothing firm based in Clapham, recently launched a project, part-funded by the Yorkshire Dales National Park’s Sustainability Fund to the tune of £5,000, to try to keep wool off the proverbial rubbish heap. 

According to Glencroft owner Edward Sexton, he wanted to step in to help these producers who have been forced to discard the product, as 'there just isn’t any other economical use for it'.

However, while some in the industry are signing up for such schemes, others are simply moving away from sheep shearing and subsequently selling the wool, and with it, the rhetoric that's been previously used to justify rearing animals for their fleeces.

British Wool’s website cites celebrity farmer Gareth Wyn Jones as saying: "We shear for the benefit of the sheep. If we didn't take the wool off, we'd have lots of problems with blowfly, laying their eggs in the back end and even the shoulders of the sheep. These eggs would hatch into maggots, which literally eat the sheep alive. "

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The organisation also cites Peter Wright, Channel 5's The Yorkshire Vet, as saying: "It's very important that sheep are sheared. One of the biggest issues we have in the UK is flystrike. Flies can lay their eggs in any dirty areas of the fleece, which then hatch into maggots which can eat through the skin. It's a very nasty disease."

However, James Edwards, a new-entrant tenant farmer with more than 1,200 ewes in his flock, told the Guardian: "Wool is a man-made thing. Naturally, sheep don’t have big woolly fleeces, because there wouldn’t be anybody there to shear them. All forms of early, primitive or wild sheep either shed their wool or it falls out.

"We bred them to have massive fleeces because of the wool trade; that was great, because wool was a fibre that was incredibly popular. Fast forward to now, it’s simply not worth anything."

Edwards’ admissions that farmers are moving away from sheep that require shearing flies in the face of the industry’s traditional rhetoric that the process is done for animal welfare reasons.

Self-shedding sheep are reportedly more resistant to flystrike, and, as farmer Edwards noted, by rearing them, not only is he saving money when it comes to removing their fleeces, he is also able to save time and money when it comes to looking for and treating the condition.

This heavily implicates the industry in elevating profit above animal welfare: as long as it was able to profit from removing the sheep’s fleeces, it was equally happy to breed those animals more at risk of debilitating conditions like flystrike, only moving away from doing so because it has become unprofitable.

As Edwards said, everyone is ‘trying to work out ways to make yourselves more streamlined and efficient’, and amid falling wool prices, removing specially bred sheep (who require shearing) from is the equation is ‘a way of doing this’.

Maria Chiorando is an MSc student and freelance journalist. Her work has been published by national and regional outlets including Surge, Plant Based News, Vegan Food & Living, the Guardian and Kent on Sunday.

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