Herga Kitty, no offence, but this sounded so much like a hoax, I went looking for a news story. Unbelievable! This really beats all! The image of sheep wearing body nets for four weeks! Do you suppose the ewes will want fancy ones with sparkles in them?*bg* Here it is in detail:

Shear Magic Australians Find New Way to Fleece Sheep
Tue Jun 4, 5:50 AM ET
By Michael Byrnes

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia has developed a way of harvesting wool that's as easy as falling off a sheep.


Instead of the traditional back-breaking method of shearing, farmers simply inject a sheep with a special protein then attach a net to the animal to collect the fleece.

The new method is being launched commercially later this month with packs containing protein injections and nets and is seen as a breakthrough value-added product for Australia's $2.3 million a year export industry.

A quarter of a million Australian sheep, in the national flock of around 110 million, are already producing fleece by the new method, developer John Le Breton, managing director of Bioclip, told Reuters on Tuesday.

"We're very happy with it. It's an easy way of doing the job," said woolgrower Liz Tomlinson, who trialled Bioclip on her 5,000 acre property at Narrabri, on the edge of the outback in northern New South Wales state.

Le Breton, who developed the product from initial research by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and marketing body The Woolmark Co, aims to have 23 million sheep producing 23 million kilograms of wool from the Bioclip method by 2009/10.

Even in its development phase, Bioclip will produce 725,000 kilograms of wool this year from Australia's clip of around 520 million kilograms of greasy wool.

Australia is the world's largest producer of wool.

For A$3.70 growers can buy an injection of a naturally occurring sheep protein which causes the wool to fall from the sheep's back, and a fleece retention net the sheep wears for four weeks while the de-fleecing occurs.

Le Breton told Reuters the cost was comparable with the cost of conventionally shearing of sheep.

CLEAN PADDOCKS

Many farmers say Bioclip is suitable only in protected environments, not open pastures.

"It's a great innovation," said Simon Campbell, president of grower body WoolProducers, during a break from shearing 22,000 sheep on his 24,000 hectare property in the northern state of Queensland.

But Campbell believes Bioclip would remain a niche product.

"I wouldn't think to use it in a pastoral situation. You want reasonably clean paddocks. For us it would be sticks and bushes (getting caught in the sheep nets)," he said by telephone from his property 624 miles northwest of Brisbane.

By 2009, Bioclip believes its invention could be used on 80 million "shearing units," or lambs and adult sheep, each year. This could mean that half of Australia's annual wool clip could be produced through this method.

Bioclip is first focusing on a target market of 40 million lambs whose wool is removed at less than five months of age.

Apart from reducing labor costs, the biological harvest also increased usable fleece length, avoids damage to the animal during conventional shearing and keeps skin pieces out of the wool, Le Breton said.

Even if "jab goes the needle" becomes a common saying in Australia's woolsheds like "click go the shears," Le Breton says the country's 6,000 shearers will still have a job collecting wool from the nets and removing unwanted matter from fleece.