Shearing School

Vol.4, No. 01 February 2008
Shearing school

Shearing School
By HC Writer Les Foshay

The word school normally doesn’t exactly conjure up excitement for most people. However, the shearing school available at the
national conference and other locations is not only educational but entertaining as well. Taught by Bill Watkins of FrostGlen
Alpacas for the last several years, dozens of students have come away with a greater appreciation for the shearing process and respect for the shearer.

Bill organizes his program into two sections, the classroom and the hands on. During the class room portion, students are introduced to the equipment, it’s history and care – through Bill’s careful tutoring. He not only covers the shearing process, but educates the students on what comprises a good and a show fleece. Students end the day with hands on practice on “neck dummies”. The simulated neck gives thestudent the feel and confidence to tackle shearing a real animal.

I met Bill at the AOBA Conference “Criation of a Lifestyle” hosted in Ruidoso New Mexico. We enjoyed similar backgrounds with
animals and our work, and got to know each other just a little that year. Several years later at AOBA’s first Kentucky show Bill sheared one of our animals as a class demonstration. We took the fleece, just as Bill’s wife Sherri had bagged it off the animal
over to the fleece portion of the composite class. Judged by Mike Safely the next day,the fleece ( and animal) took second place. Needless to say, we were duly impressed and thought we should learn more from this engineer who charted out his “strikes” with numbered accuracy.

Creating an award winning fleece takes more than luck and genetics.If a superb fleece with second cuts and non-skirted areas
enters a class it could likely drop from a sure award to the bottom of the barrel, despite it’s obviously laudable quality. In his class, Bill taught us what to look for and how to skirt a fleece properly to present it at it’s best for judging. This valuable lesson of the class more than paid for itself the next year when we won 2/3 of all the fleece awards given at the AOBA Eastern States Exposition the following year.

The following year we booked Bill for a shearing school on our farm in Vermont. We hosted breeders in the shade of our indoor classroom in the morning. At noon we retreated to the grassy yard for a catered meal Only Bill was wise enough to limit himself to a single serving, knowing Full well the efforts on bent knee for the afternoon. After demonstrating The process on Huacuaya and Suri alike, we were turned loose to change cutters and combs, to adjust tension and oil the noisy buzzing equipment. At our farm we offered, for the first time, live subjects for the students to practice on. With Bill’s careful supervision, the students got their Fill ( and feel) of real-life shearing, the animals got cooled off and everybody went home happy- and exhausted. ( And we sighed a big sigh of relief!)

The fleece is not all that benefits as a result of Bill’s careful tutoring and instruction. All the attendees of the class gained a greater
understanding for the shearing, shearing process and the shearer, be it he or she. Few of us appreciate the mechanics of the shearer’s backbreaking labor until we have bent over a dozen or so animals hour after hour or as our patellas grind into an unwilling surface. We may even attempt to balance a chattering instrument in our grasp keeping our animals intact and discovering that holding a dexterous conversation simultaneously is an impossibility! Some of our attendees discovered first hand for themselves that shearing was not their forte, and others surprised themselves with their results.

If you have alpacas, I would encourage you to attend a shearing school such as the one hosted at the AOBA conference. Even if you do not intend to shear your animals, you will be better equipped to work along side your shearer as he or she harvests that valuable commodity. You will gain greater appreciation and understanding of the quality fleece, how to shear it to show it. And you never know, maybe you’ll find your calling. And – at the very least, if you are faced with an emergency situation when you need to get the fiber off of an animal yourelf, you will be prepared to save the very source of all that wonderful fiber that this industry is all about.

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