Casar de Caceres, Spain, June 8 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 8th Jun, 2022 ) :Gripping a sheep firmly between her legs, Vanesa Castillo holds its head with one hand while she tries to shear off its thick fleece with electric clippers.
"It's scary!" said Castillo, 37, slightly unnerved by her first attempt at sheep shearing at a school for shepherds in western Spain.
"You have to pull the animal's skin taut, really slowly, so you don't cut it," explained Jose Rivero, the professional sheep shearer giving the course.
Sheep shearing is just one of the classes offered at the school in Casar de Caceres in rural Extremadura to counter the flight from the land that has left large swathes of inland Spain thinly populated.
Set up in 2015, the idea was "to bring in people who love the countryside", said Enrique "Quique" Izquierdo, who runs the school.
It aims to provide all the training and resources needed to create "a shepherd for the 21st century... with the most up-to-date methods in a sector where the traditional and the cutting-edge merge." Much of Spain's sheep and goat farming is concentrated in rugged Extremadura. The school at Casar de Caceres is one of several across the country, the first set up in the northern Basque Country in 1997.
"The traditional image of a shepherd wandering through the fields all day" doesn't exist any more, said Jurgen Robledo, a vet who said the students are taught how to use many hi-tech tools including milk control programmes.
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