Many people were discouraged from having regular haircuts due to months of social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19. But the most overgrown stay-at-home hair can't compare to the plight of an Australian merino sheep with 78 lbs. (35 kilograms) of matted, overgrown fleece.
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Baarack
To keep their coats in check, domesticated sheep typically experience regular shearings. This unique ram, known as Baarack, was discovered wandering free in a state forest in Victoria, Australia. He had not been shorn in years, and by the time he was caught and taken to Edgar's Mission Farm Sanctuary for rescued farm animals in Lancefield, Victoria, a representative of the charity told Live Science in an email, his fleece had grown into a thick, gigantic mass.
Finally, there, Baarack was shorn of his heavy, woolly burden, weighing about as much as a 10-year-old boy. "Edgar's Mission wrote on Facebook on Feb. 10. Under the pounds of matted fur, stained with mud, studded with twigs and buzzing with insects, "was not Australia's reaction to the yeti, but a sheep.
Baarack had an owner at one stage in the past, when he had been castrated and mulesed, a procedure that extracts skin from around the tail of a sheep, producing smooth scar tissue that, according to Australia's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, deters blowflies (RSPCA). According to Edgar's Mission, his ears still displayed signs of branding, but the tags were long gone, probably ripped off by the weight of his overgrown coat.
Baarack's muzzle can be seen sticking out of an enormous and crusty wool cocoon in pictures taken before his haircut. Only the sheep's hooves and a small part of his lower legs were visible as he stood; as he laid down, his legs vanished completely.
Heavy but Underweight
A load of wool around his head was so thick that it covered his face partially, and the weight of the fleece pushed over his lower eyelids, revealing dirt and dust to his eyes. According to the mission delegate, he had a debilitating ulcer in one eye caused by a trapped grass seed.
In wild and modern sheep, evidence from mitochondrial DNA, which comes from a different genome within mitochondria or energy-making cells, suggests that domesticated sheep are descended from the mouflon (Ovis Orientalis), and their domestication started in the Fertile Crescent about 11,000 years ago, researchers published in the Eurasian Journal of Applied Biotechnology in 2018. Sheep have been selectively bred to produce wool for human consumption for thousands of years, and domesticated sheep no longer shed their coats seasonally like their wild ancestors.
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Chris
Live Science previously recorded that in 2015, an overgrown merino sheep named Chris (also in Australia) set a record for having the most wool removed in one shearing, losing more than 90 lbs. (41 kg) of matted fleece. Chris was saved from the wild by RSPCA workers, who estimated that he hadn't been shorn in at least five years.
Free From Wools
According to The Guardian, the amount of wool withdrawn from Baarack will be enough to knit 61 sweaters or 490 pairs of men's socks.
Now that the downtrodden Baarack doesn't have to peek through a matted, crusty fleece curtain, his future surely looks much better. And it's wool that finishes wool with rescue staff at Edgar's Mission treating the underweight sheep back to fitness.
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