NZ Sheep With 60 Pounds of Wool Was Not Attacked by Wolves
The Claim
A New Zealand sheep escaped captivity and spent six years without being sheared. During this time, the animal grew 60 pounds of wool. Wolves tried to eat it but their teeth were unable to penetrate the sheep’s thick wool coat.
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Emerging story
The claim is an addition to a 2004 story about a sheep named Shrek. It has been circulating on social media platforms since 2020.
Misbar’s Analysis
While the claim that a sheep escaped and grew 60 pounds of wool is true, the portion about the wolf attack is not. The story of the escaped sheep named Shrek that spent six years without getting sheared received quite a bit of publicity when it first happened in 2004.
Shrek was featured in books, sheared live on national television, and even had an audience with the New Zealand Prime Minister. He made headlines one last time when he died in 2011 at the age of 16.
The problem with this recent version of the Shrek the sheep legend is there is no way he was ever attacked by wolves. The only native mammals to New Zealand are bats and marine mammals. The country has no native land predators, other than birds, and certainly no wolves.
There are feral dogs that were first brought to the island by Polynesian voyagers. The wild canines are a threat to local wildlife and efforts have been made to control their populations. However, there is no evidence that Shrek was ever attacked by them.
