SANTA ANA : At Zoo, All’s Wool That Ends Wool

The 1,300 elementary-school students who gathered at the Santa Ana Zoo on Friday let out a gasp of sympathy as Godzilla’s woolly head was craned back, forcing her to submit to the shears of Don Paulson. Godzilla, a large Suffolk sheep with thick wool that covered her eyes and drooped off her belly, was bent into a kneeling position and pinched between sheep-shearer Paulson’s knees. Godzilla stared straight ahead and sometimes struggled as Paulson ran the clipping shears over her.

After five minutes, the confrontation ended. Godzilla had lost about 10 pounds of greasy, grass-stained fleece--a year’s worth of growth--and just a little blood after suffering a nick near one of her front legs.

“She doesn’t even feel it,” Paulson, a professional sheep shearer from Pomona, assured the students from Orange and Los Angeles counties who had come to witness the 10th annual Sheepshearing Festival. Godzilla and five other sheep were relieved of their wool during the noon demonstration, held every spring.

The annual field trip to the sheepshearing festival was designed to show the students how clothing is made from the animal’s wool. Behind the trailer where the demonstration occurred, students petted yet-to-be-shorn sheep. Tables were also set up for students to watch spinsters transform fleece into refined yarn on spinning wheels.

“We shear the sheep once a year just before summer,” said Tish Flynn, educational specialist at the zoo and coordinator of the largest of the zoo’s educational events. The sheep are normally kept in the children’s zoo, where they are petted and fed regularly by visitors.

Paulson and his shearing partner, Lew Flory of Riverside, have administered the annual haircuts to the sheep at the zoo for several years to entertain and educate the students.

“It looks like it is easy,” Flory said. “But the sheep are not always laying there like you want them to. They are always struggling.”

“We try not to nick them,” he told the crowd of students who were concerned for the slightly bloodied sheep. “But even a shearer who has been doing it for 20 years is going to draw blood once in a while.”