Shears

Shears are a tool used to obtain wool from sheep, collect Red Mushrooms from Mooshrooms, get string from cobwebs, destroy wool blocks more efficiently, harvest placeable leaf, vine, fern, dead bush, or tall grass blocks, and safely remove tripwire.

Uses
Shears are the most efficient way to acquire wool from sheep (each sheep provides 1-3 blocks of wool when sheared). Sheep can also be colored with dye before shearing, allowing the player to produce unlimited amounts of colored wool.

By using shears on tree leaves you can obtain placeable leaf blocks that do not decay. (Normally, destroying a leaf block drops a sapling at a frequency of about 5%, and oak trees occasionally drop apples.) Shears can also be used to harvest Grass, Ferns, Dead Bushes and Vines. Shears cannot harvest blocks from a Big Mushroom.

Shears destroy cobwebs in half a second, yielding one piece of string, and harvest Red Mushrooms from a Mooshroom, which turns it back into a normal Cow. As of 12w50a, you can enchant shears and give them Silk Touch to harvest cobwebs. Using an Anvil, you can give shears Unbreaking I, II or III.

To shear a sheep in the Pocket Edition, you must touch and hold down on the screen, similar to breaking a block. If you do not, you will simply hurt the sheep and eventually kill it (8 hits).

Speed and durability
The following table shows the time it takes to break blocks on which shears have any effect. Colors indicate what will be dropped:
 * White: an original block.
 * Blue: block's normal drop (i.e. string, seeds, sapling, apple).
 * Red: nothing.

Trivia

 * Shears are the only tool except the sword that has a specific right-click action (shearing sheep and mooshrooms) and left-click action (collecting leaves, vines, string from cobwebs, dead bushes, and tall grass).
 * Also shears are the only tool that are used to break blocks that only have one version (made with iron ingots); as opposed to pickaxes, hoes, axes and shovels that can be made out of wooden planks, cobblestone, iron ingots, gold ingots and diamonds.
 * Hitting a wool block with shears will break it quickly, but not damage the shears themselves. This also applies to a limited number of other blocks which can be collected with Silk Touch-enchanted shears, that last including glass and glowstone, making Silk Touch-enchanted shears invaluable for moving these materials.
 * If leaves are sheared with shears, they will not drop saplings, unlike using a tool with a Silk Touch enchantment on leaves, which will occasionally drop saplings.