Defleece

At that point, the fiber breaks easily and the whole fleece can be separated at the skinline, leaving the sheep completely bare. By grasping a handful of wool and rolling it back, a worker can defleece a sheep quickly and systematically without strain on himself, discomfort to the sheep, or wastage of wool.

It is difficult to imagine anyone disbelieving that machines fly safely and regularly around the world, but how many people believe that robots will eventually be programmed to shear sheep or that sheep will be fed a pill to defleece them?

At the twelfth annual Diné Be' Iiná (Sheep Is Life) festival held on the rodeo grounds at Diné College in Tsaile, I gathered with others to watch a traditional sheep shearing, marveling at how the practitioner pinned the writhing animal on the ground and proceeded to defleece its entire body with a pair of large scissors, curls of fur falling off to expose a tender, downy undercoat with a precise, uniform, and masterly cut.