Baraack, the wild sheep that was found with a huge 35-kilogram (77-pound) fleece coat, is doing well after his rescuers sheared him.
Struggling under a filthy fleece caked with years of mud and tangled debris, Baarack was spotted at the beginning of February in a Victorian state forest and taken Edgar’s Mission Farm Sanctuary.
“I couldn’t believe there was actually a sheep alive under all of that wool,” Pam Ahern, founder of the sanctuary, told Nine News. The sheep’s matted coat had been growing uncut for close to five years, Ahern estimated.
Ahren thinks he was once an owned sheep. “I think he has been a cheeky little rascal of a young lamb who’s just wandered off and never came back,” she said.
His before and after process gained millions of views on social media. Now, Baarack is able to run free and play with his new friends, the sanctuary said in a Facebook post.
“He is blissfully ignorant of the media storm he has created, the only hint of his past trauma being the few shearing nicks that mark his body,” the post said.
Human selective breeding
“Sheep of today require at least annual shearing for their welfare. This is a direct result of human selective breeding for wool that is harvested for commercial purposes and speaks to how we have altered their lives,” Edgar’s Mission explained.
“The wild mouflon of Europe and Asia, from whom they are descended, was a coarse-haired animal with a downy undercoat. This body covering responded to the seasons, growing dense and providing protection in the cooler months, only to then be shed (on their own) in the summer months.”
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