A decision is made quickly whether to slaughter the lamb or raise it for its meat and wool, with shepherds weighing how much rain and grass they believe will be available that year. Usually about half of the lambs will be killed for their pelts.

It is not only European sensibilities that are offended by the killing of the lambs. The Taliban, when they were in power in Afghanistan, tried to clamp down on the trade as well, particularly in the cruelest top end of it: pelts from lambs that have not yet been born, requiring the killing of pregnant ewes to harvest. Experts estimate they make up less than 10 percent of the pelts sold.

Mr. Tawakaly even empathized with his Finnish hecklers to some degree. As a child, he dreaded the slaughter of lambing season and once ran away with a newborn lamb, hoping to save it.

“After two days, my father caught me and he killed it,” Mr. Tawakaly said, with a half-smile, half-grimace. “It was his business, and I couldn’t stop him.”

While most lamb pelts from Afghanistan and other Central Asian states are shipped abroad, a few of the best are sent to Kabul, where furriers style them into the memorable peaked hats former President Hamid Karzai made famous. A silvery or tan karakul hat can sell for more than $1,000.

The karakul sheep’s fur was once so widely admired that President Theodore Roosevelt personally involved himself in efforts to import a karakul flock to the United States in 1909. But despite years of trying, American ranchers and the Department of Agriculture struggled to raise a flock with the same quality of fur as those in Central Asia.