Wool is obtained from sheep, goat, yak and some other animals.
These wool-yielding animals bear hair on their body.
These animals have a thick coat of hair.
The hair traps a lot of air in the spaces between them. So, their hair keeps the animals warm.
Wool is derived from these hairy fibres.
Wool from Sheep:
The most interesting thing about wool is that sheep didn't always have wool, or not enough to notice.
When people first started hunting sheep, they hunted them for their meat.
Sometime not too much later people also began to make clothes, instead of just wearing furs.
Since they had sheepskins around, one of the fibres they used was sheep hair.
They noticed that although none of the sheep hair was really any good for spinning, because it was too thick and brittle, some of the hair from the stomach, the underside of the sheep, was better than the rest.
So, people began breeding the sheep that had the best hair together, trying to get some hair you could spin.
It took thousands of years, many generations of sheep, but by about 5000 BC, people could begin to spin wool.
The hairy coat of the sheep has two types of fibres:
The coarse beard hair
The soft under-hair that is found close to the skin.
It is this soft under-hair that is used to make wool.
The finest wool is obtained from the Merino, a breed of sheep originally from Spain.
Rearing of Sheep
Rearing:
To keep animals in a farm and taking care of them for their uses is called rearing.
If we travel to the hills in Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, or the plains of Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat, we can see shepherds taking their herds of sheep for grazing.
Sheep:
Sheep are herbivores and feed on grass and leaves.
Apart from grazing sheep, rearers feed them a mixture of pulses, corn, jowar, oil cakes and minerals.
In winter, sheep are kept indoors and fed on leaves, grain and dry fodder.
Sheep are reared in many parts of our country for wool.
Certain breeds of sheep have thick coat of hair on their body which yields good quality wool in large quantities.
Some Indian breeds of sheep are:
Once the reared sheep have developed a thick growth of hair, hair is shaved off for getting wool.
The best wool comes from the International Wool Secretariat (IWS) member countries like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Uruguay.
