Three years ago, a hiker in Victoria, Australia, stumbled across a heaping wool pile on the ground while ascending Mount Alexander. As he approached the mound of matted fluff, he jumped to find a pair of eyes staring back at him, begging for help.
The hiker messaged a local farm animal sanctuary called Edgar’s Mission to report the helpless sheep, later named Alex, and the staff responded instantly.
“Oh, how our hearts bottomed out when the pictures came through of Alex,” Edgar’s Mission wrote on Facebook. “A hapless sheep [burdened] by an abundance of wool …”
Removing Alex from the mountain wouldn’t be an easy task. Considering the average weight of an adult male sheep, plus the layers of dense fleece smothering Alex, it would require a team to carry him out of the woods.
But the Edgar’s Mission crew refused to leave Alex where he lay. They soon arrived with a stretcher and worked together to lift the poor sheep to safety. They carried him to the sanctuary’s ambulatory van, where founder Pam Ahern began administering life-saving fluids.
On their way to the sanctuary, Ahern began examining Alex. She could tell he was scared, as any wild animal with minimal human interaction would be, and she tried to comfort him as best she could. She promised Alex that the team would try to remove his suffocating coat as quickly as possible and that he would soon feel better.
The team worked tirelessly to free Alex from his dense wool, and little by little, they began to see a flicker of hope return to his eyes.
“I lifted the wool from his eye, and he looked me in the eye, and I thought, ‘My God, you’re going to live. You’re going to live!’” Ahern told The Dodo. “Something in my heart just thought, ‘This guy has hung on for so long — that inch of hope was all he needed.’”
A few hours later, the team shaved the last tuft of Alex’s debris-filled fleece away, and the sweet boy was finally free from his burdensome coat. When they placed his wool on a scale, the crew was shocked to find that it weighed 88 pounds — almost as much as Alex did without it.
“He had nearly his body weight in wool on his back,” Ahern said.
It’s been almost three years since Alex was rescued, and the once-helpless sheep is now thriving. When he’s not feasting on the contents of his hay bucket, Alex can usually be found hanging out with Chloe and Molly Brown.
It may be a simple life for a sheep, but Alex isn’t taking his second chance for granted. He’s grateful for every moment spent at Edgar’s Mission and thankful for the strangers who found him and vowed to save his life.