and then I saw Prickles,
a bare-faced merino sheep that ran away from a Tasmanian farm during the 2013 bushfires who really needed one! according
to farmer Alice Gray, Prickles was only a lamb when she ran away, and has remained at large since then, they had
spotted her a few times, and even recorded footage of her with surveillance
cameras installed to monitor deer activity, so they knew she was alive, but
they didn’t expect her to ever return on the farm, they were wrong, photographs Alice
Gray/MyCause,
Ms. Gray
told ABC.net.au that she and the family were celebrating
her son’s sixth birthday when they caught a glimpse of the runaway sheep. They
had decided to barbecue at the back paddock of their farm for a change of
scenery during their self-isolation, and that’s when they spotted this “big,
white, fluffy thing on the other side of the dam”. The birthday party suddenly
turned into a sheep chase, the farmer
recalls that at one point her husband disappeared, only to call her later,
saying that he had managed to catch Prickles and leap on the her, pinning her
down. He needed some help because the sheep didn’t seem eager to follow him
home. She and the kids found him, and managed to load the fluffy sheep in the
back of a truck,
not
sheering sheep for long periods of time can cause some serious problems,
including impeding the ability of a sheep to regulate its body temperature,
which can cause it to overheat and die. Luckily, Prickles is a bare faced
merino, and the fact that she doesn’t grow wool on her head helped her survive,
and the story is not over yet, there is a lot of wool on the rest of this
runaway sheep, and come May 1st, we are going to find out how much. The Grays
are currently holding a competition to guess the weight of Prickles’ fleece to
raise money online through MyCause for the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees, and they will finally sheer her on May 1st. Nobody knows
if Prickles wool is record breaking, but in order to make the record books, the
sheep’s fleece will need to be heavier than 41.1 kilograms, all I can say is that Pickles must have a good memory to return home!
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