Rogue sheep rescued in Hawke's Bay and given life-saving haircuts

A couple of rogue sheep weighed down by huge woolly coats have finally been nabbed and given potentially life-saving hair cuts.

The sheep had been roaming free on Hawke's Bay's rugged and very steep Te Mata peak for some time.

Previous efforts to wrangle them have failed, but then the wandering woolies were spotted on a ridge several months ago, and a posse was dispatched to capture the fugitives.

Napier SPCA inspector Jade Van Syp was part of the team sent out to recover the sheep, and told Checkpoint the animals were like "massive clouds of wool" when they tracked them down.

"You couldn't even see their feet, it was all the way to the ground

"They looked like two or three sheep stuck together."

Van Syp said they had heard from multiple people that the sheep were "unmusterable", but they worked with a local farmer who was pretty confident that they could catch them, and a team of six humans and three dogs were despatched to bring down the two sheep.

"So he managed to get up above them and push them down to where we had a team of us, and one of our MPI inspectors that was helping out rugby-tackled one of them and the other one just sat down and accepted it.

"It was very surprising how easy it was, once we got one of them."

The sheep were then tied up and loaded up on a horse float, putting them in one of at a time, with four people needed to lift them into the float.

Van Syp said the main concern for the sheep was heat exhaustion.

"We have some pretty hot summer here in the Hawke's Bay, So I was just getting really worried with the sunnier days that we were having."

She said one of the locals helping out was an ex-shearer - "He was keen to give a go, so he gave us a hand."

She said it was a big task, with a few SPCA staff helping the shearer hold them down, but their wool came off relatively quickly.

"They were surprisingly in good nick and they were a bit overweight as well, which we were really surprised about, and the wool was actually quite clean, the closer you got to their skin."

She said the wool would be donated to a local wool business. "We can't let it go to waste. They could probably make quite a few things out of it."

Van Syp said the farmer who helped them out was keen to adopt them, so the animals had gone to live with him.