Ram sheds fleece worth 30 sweaters

A wild merino ram that was named Chris was rescued from a scrubland in Canberra on Tuesday with an overwhelmingly overgrown coat. It produced 40.5 kilograms of wool after it was shaved. Reports suggested that it has unofficially broken the world record of maximum volume of wool being extracted from a sheep at a time.

The huge amount of wool extracted from the male sheep is enough to make 30 sweaters out of it. Chris was rescued by Canberra RSPCA and Chief Executive Tammy Ven Dange said on Thursday that she is planning to register Chris with the Guinness Book Records.

After it was shorn, the total weight of the ram reduced to almost half about 44 kilograms. Chris has managed to beat Shrek, a hermit ram in New Zealand that grew a coat weighing 27 kilograms. Shrek was hiding in caves for six years before being rescued and shorn in 2004.

Chris was so woolly that it could have posed a serious risk to its life. Sheep can face health hazards if they are not shorn regularly. Vets were initially worried that it might die of shock while being shorn. Thus, it was sedated during the process.

The sheep could barely walk under the weight of its fleece and RSPCA estimated that it has not been shorn in about five years. Four-time Australian Shearing Championship winner Ian Elkins, along with 4 helpers, took 42 minutes to shear the sheep. Shearing a sheep that has not been shorn for 12 months takes about three minutes and the fleece weighs around 5 kilograms.

"It was a challenge but the sheep was calm and the vets gave it a mild sedation before we started the shear," was quoted by ABC as saying Elkins. "We started on the belly, just laid it on its back, kept it comfortable. There were parts of the sheep where we had to cut it in different layers because the problem for me shearing it was the weight of the fleece was pulling on the skin and we wanted to keep the skin cuts to a minimum."

Dange said that the sheep is pretty much comfortable in its own skin now and the RSPCA would take another seven days to find its legal owner before sending it to a new home, the ABC reported.

Contact the writer at feedback@ibtimes.com.au, or let us know what you think below.