NZ 20: Making Friends
Thursday, August 14. 2008
Rakaia River Valley, NZ (May 30, 2008)
While driving along the road climbing the Rakaia River Valley, I stopped many times to take photos of the exceptional landscape. In one such occasion I saw these cows at the far end of their pasture, and started to take photos of them. They noticed, and started to get closer and closer, until I had trouble fitting all of them in the frame. I guess they were feeling alone and wanted some company. I stayed there for a little while, and then we said goodbye and I started driving up again.
New Zealand is certainly a country with a lot of farm animals. Until not too many years ago there were over 70 million sheep; now the sheep are only 40 million, still about 12 sheep every human inhabitant. The decrease in number of sheep is due to competition with other types of farm animals, including my cow friends, but also deers, ostriches, llamas and other exotic species. I can assure you that finding a llama or an ostrich in the hill country of New Zealand can be a quite unexpected encounter, but it did happen to us. There are about 10 million cows in NZ (equally divided between beef and dairy cattle), which still makes for a respectable 3 cattle each human. One can only hope that all these animals will not go the Orwellian way (yeah, I don’t know how many pigs there are in NZ, go look to Wikipedia).
