Sheep-Shearing TikTok is the most soothing place on the internet

Katie McRose, the founder of the traveling animal shearing business Right Choice Shearing, remembers the first time she posted a TikTok video showing off her work. It was back in March of this year, and the 26-year-old felt confident that the clip — a silly, short skit in which she carefully “sheared” a Play-Doh sheep — would quickly go viral. Instead, it racked up just a few thousand views, with a handful of kind but not exactly enthusiastic comments. 

“Nobody thought that was funny. Nobody liked my video,” McRose recalls, speaking to Mashable over the phone in early November. “Which was fine — I didn’t really care.”

She did care, though, when one of the next videos she posted, a cute clip of her moving a walk-resistant alpaca in a wheelbarrow to get his haircut, got 100,000 views. And she really cared when just a few days later, a TikTok that her wife, Darian, uploaded of McRose shearing a different alpaca to the beat of Masked Wolf”s “Astronaut in the Ocean” garnered a million views. A couple weeks after that, when videos of McRose working on animals while discussing their individual situations (i.e. “This is Tony, and it looks like he’s seen some shit. Maybe a haircut will help?”) started racking up views in the tens of millions, McRose knew that she’d hit on something big.

“We couldn’t believe it,” says the shearer, who’s based in Texas but travels with her wife to farms across the Midwest for her work. “They were just totally enthralled.” 

Today, just eight months after that first underperforming TikTok, Right Choice Shearing has plenty of new clients and 2.2 million followers, many of whom are so devoted to the account that they regularly “like” new content before the clips even finish loading. 

When people tell me that they enjoy my videos, it’s typically because there was some kind of stress in their life, and that video brought them zen.

On an average video, the hundreds of comments are a mix of awe (“this has to be hard, but you make it look so easy!”), curiosity (“how long did it take to learn how to do this?”), and, largely, gratitude. “I never knew how much I needed this content,” is a frequent refrain, as is, “wow, this relaxed me so much.” For many viewers, it seems watching sheep-shearing videos is the equivalent of taking a hot bath or practicing yoga: calming, comforting, and extremely satisfying.

“When people tell me that they enjoy my videos, it’s typically because there was some kind of stress in their life, and that video brought them zen,” says McRose. 

She often receives messages from parents telling her that they watch her TikToks with their kids as their nightly routine, or from people undergoing medical procedures who share that Right Choice Shearing’s videos helped them cope with their anxiety. Recently, a grandmother of a newborn reached out to tell McRose that when the infant experienced medical complications, she distracted herself in the hospital by spending “hours” watching her videos. 

“People are saying that these videos help them through hard times,” the shearer says. “It’s just very humbling.”

The idea of watching sheep-shearing videos as a form of stress relief may sound odd, but there are actually a number of psychological reasons for the comfort people find in these clips. For one thing, there’s the contrast of a petite human handling a large animal with seemingly graceful ease; as McRose puts it bluntly, “I’m not some big, burly guy, but I’m out there taking these huge sheep and just dancing with them.” 

Beyond the physicality, there’s the undeniable thrill of seeing a matted, dirtied fleece fall to the ground to reveal an animal’s gorgeous, rich coloring underneath — often in just a few large swoops.

“There is an instinctive biological response to grooming,” explains Dr. Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist and faculty member at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. “You can actually have a dopamine response not just to the satisfaction of watching it, but also just to the act of grooming.”

The monotony of shearing, too, adds to the content’s appeal, says Dr. Rutledge, especially for viewers who struggle with high stress, ADHD, or anxiety. “One of the things that’s very common is repetitive activity as sort of self-medication [for those conditions],” she explains.

With their routine movements and predictable consistency, shearing videos can have a similar effect on viewers as ASMR content, which is proven to relieve stress. “For everyone who feels anxious or out of control, to watch something like that, that’s so discrete and sort of a caretaking act and accomplished so successfully, is very reassuring,” says Dr. Rutledge.

The fact that some shearers appear to bond closely with the animals they work with, while completing a difficult task in just a few minutes’ time and calmly narrating the process for viewers, just adds to that impact. For instance, when McRose shares the backstories of the animals or her origins in sheep-shearing, it presents “multiple access points for emotional engagement,” explains Dr. Rutledge, adding, “when you feel emotionally connected to her, it makes the videos all the more satisfying, because you’re experiencing them with a friend.”

And then there’s the before-and-after element of the shearing process, which, when sped up to fit into a three-minute-or-less TikTok, brings an additional level of enjoyment. “It’s the experiential equivalent of a soundbite,” says Dr. Rutledge. “You can have that full narrative arc in a very short period of time… it really triggers one of those core motivational theories, where you’re triggering agency. Like, ‘we’ve got something done, wow!’”

One of the things that’s very common is repetitive activity as sort of self-medication.

Cameron Wilson, a Scotland-based sheep shearer behind the popular TikTok and YouTube channels The Sheep Game, believes that another part of the appeal is the unfamiliarity most viewers have with animal shearing. “Whenever I do shearing demonstrations on TikTok or YouTube videos, people are just amazed by the whole process,” 31-year-old Wilson says. “They’re seeing something they’ve never seen before — it almost answers a question they’ve never thought to ask.”

Like McRose, Wilson travels frequently to perform his sheep-shearing duties; this year alone, he’s shorn “over 19,000 sheep” across the UK, he says, many of whom have been featured on his accounts. And while he receives many excited and satisfied comments on his videos, he also regularly fields questions from viewers questioning the necessity of shearing or expressing their concerns over the welfare of the animals. 

Annual shearing is necessary for wool sheep (as opposed to their brethren, hair sheep) since the wool isn’t naturally shed and can cause issues like hyperthermia and temporary blindness when left unshorn. But the practice itself is not without risk. Shearers who work too quickly or handle the animals too roughly can cause nicks or cuts occasionally deep enough to require stitches, says Lauri Torgerson-White, the Director of Research for Farm Sanctuary, an animal refuge in Los Angeles and New York. 

Even more, sheep bred specifically for their wool production are often killed at the end of their “useful” life cycles, she adds. 

Both Wilson and McRose don’t refute these unfortunate realities of the industry (“There’s always bad apples,” McRose says matter-of-factly), but they do take pains to educate viewers of their own methods in their content, patiently explaining things like why they place the animals in certain positions and debunking claims that the animals are sedated or otherwise hurt during the process. Over time, McRose says, she’s seen her lessons take hold with viewers, with some even informing others in the comments sections about the benefits of shearing.

“That’s probably one of the things I’m most proud of, being able to try, at least, to bridge that gap between the general public and the industry,” she says. “I feel like my videos have accomplished that.”

And if they happen to also help viewers chill out after a hard day or provide a quick boost of dopamine? That’s all the better. 

“I just thought maybe that people would like to see cute sheep,” McRose says, laughing. “I never would’ve thought that it would be so impactful on people’s lives.”