Wool: Wool is an animal fibre. It comes from the animals like sheep, goat, llama and alpaca. It is present as a thick coat of hair on the body of certain animals which keeps them warm. This body coat fine soft hair is called fleece. Air gets trapped in the space between the hair. Since air is a poor conductor of heat. So, the air trapped in hair shields the body from cold and keeps them warm in winter.  The hair close to our skin i.e. hair on our body and arms is soft and hair on our head is coarse hair. Like us, the hairy skin of sheep has two types of fibres that form its fleece (or wool):

The fine soft under hair provide the fibre for making wool. To obtain breeds of sheep that possess only fine under hair, their parents are carefully chosen. This process of selecting parents for obtaining special characteristics in their offspring such as soft under hair in sheep is termed as ‘selective breeding.’ Such sheep give not only better quality of wool but the yield per sheep is also higher. Australia is the biggest grower of wool in the world.

Characteristics of Wool: