Ponder Natural Health Notes

Everybody loves a festival, even the folks who shave furry animals and make things out of their soft natural fibers. My home town hosts an annual Fiber Festival, with up-close-and-personal access to exotic fiber-bearing critters, demonstrations by talented artisans, and lots of shopping opportunities. There are food vendors with tasty treats and drinks. There are wood chips on the ground. It’s a lot like the county fair, but they don’t slaughter everything afterwards. Plus, it smells better and the livestock is a lot cuter. 

The stars of these festivals are the animals. This year, first place for adorability was a tie between the Angora rabbits and the alpacas. Fluffy white lambs gamboled in a distant second. The rabbits are a long-eared variety with thick, sumptuous fur. They are the prototype for the common domesticated dust bunny. Alpacas, if you’ve never seen any, are a member of the camel family but much smaller – somewhere between a Saint Bernard and a miniature pony.  They don’t have humps like a camel, but they do have a long neck and slender legs; imagine a furry, four-legged ostrich. 

There were also a lot of llamas around. These are larger, more disdainful cousins of the alpacas. Their fiber is not quite as soft nor as highly valued as the alpacas’ but they make up for it in volume. To make up for their slightly snooty demeanor, they can also serve as pack animals. Surprisingly, they are protective and big enough to work as guard animals for the more vulnerable alpacas. Perhaps it is this sense of responsibility that makes them a bit aloof. 

Members of the camel family are said to spit at other creatures when annoyed. I’ve probably annoyed most members of the camel family at some point (don’t ask), but have yet to see one spit. This has been a great disappointment in an otherwise fulfilling life. When questioned, the animals’ caretakers claim that they (the animals, not the caretakers) mostly spit at one another. I’m not convinced. Such a feature would seem to be a major attraction, since they are otherwise lacking in entertainment skills. At the least, I would expect to see a market for alpaca-spit shoeshine polish, or perhaps llama-spit hair mousse. 

Less exotic perhaps, but with larger speaking roles, were the sheep. These took part in hourly sheep-shearing demonstrations (using a different sheep each hour, in case you were wondering). The human participants wield a set of heavy-duty clippers and show off a variety of sheep-wrangling techniques. Some make use of a rope suspended from a contraption eerily similar to a gallows. Others hogtie the sheep on the ground, and yet others use their body weight to roll the sheep around while they buzz away with the shears. The result is a slow-motion ballet between a tough, lean rancher and a giant marshmallow. The sheep seem pretty well resigned to their submissive roles. Some offer a token bleat or kick of protest, but mostly they stare vacantly into the distance. Come to think of it, that’s what sheep do when they are not being sheared. All in all, they seem to get through it unharmed, although I still wonder about the lamb gyros being sold in the booth next to the holding pens. 

If you ever get the chance to attend a fiber festival, I hope you won’t pass it up. You can stock up on luxuriously soft yarns or socks and sweaters. You can see the fascinating process that transforms raw natural fibers into exquisitely finished products that your cat will love to sleep on. You can learn about animal husbandry from the experts and see exotic animals from around the world. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see a llama spit. Just don’t forget to duck.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 2:23 am and is filed under Lifestyle - Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.