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Summary: Watch a naturalist from the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Drumlin Farm explain the difference between wool colors in this free online video.
Views: 1,086 | Tags: techniques, wool, types, food, pets, animals, animal, behavior, breeding, shepherd, wildlife, raise, farm, farming, agriculture, sheep, lambs, ewes, rams, husbandry, habits, mutton, biology, zoology, anatomy, farm animals
About the Expert
Tia Pinney Tia Pinney is a Teacher Naturalist and Adult Program Coordinator at Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She is involved ... read more
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Questions & AnswersAlright color of wool. Wool color varies highly from breed to breed and from individual to individual. One of the things about a sheep is blah, blah, blah black sheep is very unusual, almost impossible to get a truly black wool. This lamb when it was born was much darker. There are a couple of darker lambs behind me. But when this lamb was born it was dark and it would have been called a black lamb. Not true. We refer to it as natural color. This is probably the color of the ancestor of this particular breed of sheep. It was much more like this but you can see it is sort of a grayish brown. It will fade, it will bleach. It will do all kinds of things. Once we started breeding sheep, we very rapidly bred for a white sheep. If you have a white wool, then you can make it any color you want. You don't need to bleach the color out of the wool before you can color it when you are making a garment. So we bred for the white sheep. White sheep would not have occurred in the wild. Not good to be a white animal in the wild because it just makes you stick out unless you happen to live near the poles. So being white was not a good thing. We breed for white sheep so that we can dye their wool and make any color that we want. But this is a natural colored sheep and that is a white sheep.
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