Ask Arthur 2022, Part 5: Sheepish

Here we are, finally at the end of this year’s “Ask Arthur” series. I saved this one for the end, precisely because it’s a non-serious topic—a bit of fun (for me, anyway…) to end the series.

This final question is from Roger Green, but it wasn’t actually intended as an AAA-22 question. Instead, it was a comment he left on a post last month, “Again seizing opportunities”, where he said:

I'm only partially kidding, but couldn't you just rent some sheep? I hear you have a lot of sheep in NZ. In fact – REALLY – there are sheep for rent in ALB, though I've never used them.

The context here is that my post was about mowing my lawns, something I’ve had to do frequently over the past few months, and rain was making that difficult. The serious (more or less) part is that I didn’t know the answer to the specific question, and the non-serious part (for me…) is that it touched on something that to me—an immigrant to New Zealand—is funny.

But, first things first: Is it even possible to keep sheep in a city?

The short answer seems to be “no”. Maybe—it’s absolutely unclear. In April 2018, Stuff published an article, “Can I keep a farm animal in my backyard?” The article talked about some of the varying regulations for keeping farm animals in cities around New Zealand, and was updated “to reflect bylaws in 2019 after police found a horse roaming the suburban streets of [Auckland’s] Epsom”. The regulations vary widely, but sheep weren’t specifically mentioned.

My next step was to try and find out from the website of Hamilton City Council (HCC) if having sheep within the city was permitted, but in typical HCC fashion, the website was largely unfathomable (yes, I could’ve rung and asked, but I didn’t). As near as I can tell, some farm animals may be okay if the section (property) is large enough, and if the animal won’t be a nuisance to neighbours. Animal welfare seems to be the primary concern, as it should be, and it appeared that in at least some cases, HCC would have to issue permits to keep an animal. Overall, the HCC website had no clear, easy to access answers to my questions (definitely not the first time that’s been the case…). So, I’m going to assume that no, you can’t have sheep in an urban area of Hamilton, like where I live.

I do know that in rural areas people with what we call “lifestyle blocks” (large properties, like, say, a couple acres that aren’t farmed) will sometimes have neighbouring farmers graze stock on their property so it doesn’t have to me mowed. When Nigel and I talked about moving out to a more rural area (even when we still lived in Paeroa), he sometimes talked about exactly that: Having a nearby farmer graze stock on our property. He also said goats weren’t an option because “they eat anything and everything.” We ended up moving back to Auckland, and by the time we moved to a more rural part of Auckland, he was over the idea of having a large property, and so, having stock graze on it.

I don’t know if there’s anyone who actually “rents” stock to property owners, and in the situations I described the farmer looks after the stock and the landowner provides, essentially, free food for it. There may well be financial arrangements akin to rentals going on, but it’s not something I know anything about.

There are times, I’ll admit, where having some grazing animal seems like an attractive option (not counting Leo eating grass, as he sometimes does), but it’s not practical and would be just another burden for me. In otgher words, not an option.

There—that’s the "serious" part done.

The thing that amused me was one thing Roger said: “I hear you have a lot of sheep in NZ”. This is always reminds me how some New Zealanders are irrationally sensitive about the topic of sheep. I think it comes from decades of mockery, especially from Australians, about how there were more sheep than people in New Zealand, and how Kiwis were “sheep shaggers”. The irony is that when I arrived in New Zealand, Australia had far more sheep than New Zealand did, and while I wouldn’t care to speculate on how personally attached individual Australians were to their flocks, I suspect there may have been some very close bonds among them.

Here are the actial facts, for the record: New Zealand’s sheep numbers have been declining for decades as more and more farms are converted from sheep to dairy cattle, urban areas grow to accomodate a rising human population, and lamb, and especially wool, become less profitable. The crash in the price of wool could well be the biggest single factor in the decline of sheep as an industry.

New Zealand had a peak of 70 million sheep in 1982, and that had dropped to 26 million sheep in the year ended June 2020, according to Stats NZ, which was a drop of 800,000 from the previous year (that drop in 2020 was largely because of persistent drought conditions). Over the preceding decade alone, sheep number dropped by 6.5 million, which was a fall of 20%.

For comparison, there were 6.2 million dairy cattle in June 2020, down slightly on the previous year. There were also 3.9 million beef cattle, which was similar to the previous year.

In June 2020, sheep meat exports brought in $4 billion, but wool brought in only $460 million, and that was almost half of the $800 million it earned only 8 years earlier, in 2012. The annual value of dairy product exports in 2020 was $16.6 billion (about a third of which went to China, NZ’s largest dairy export market), and total beef exports were worth about $3.8 billion for the year ended June 2020, up around half a million from the year before. The fact that dairy and beef exports collectively earn so much more than all sheep product exports is why I say it's the main driver for the decline in sheep numbers.

Back in 1995, I was fascinated by NZ’s perceived dependence on sheep, and amused by Kiwis' reluctance to talk about it. I was working for a company that published magazines (as vehicles for selling ads), and one of them was a guide for backpackers visiting New Zealand. We needed some fillers and decided to put in a series of “Did you know?” fun facts about the country to entertain foreign visitors. I decided to find out how many sheep per person there were at the time, so I rang some government agency (it may have been Stats NZ—I don’t remember) to find the answer. A coworker, who also edited the publication, said to me, “I never could’ve done that!” I think she thought it was kind of funny, though perhaps not as much as I did. To me, the whole “how many sheep per person” thing played right in the face of the mockery, which is actually what appealed to me the most.

So, I chuckled when I saw in the Stats NZ piece I linked to above that “there are now five sheep per person – a drop from the 1982 historic high of 22 per person.” When I asked in 1995, there were approximately 14.5 sheep per person, and to update a joke I made when talking about the fall in sheep numbers some years ago, I might say, “In 1995, there were 14.5 sheep per person in New Zealand, and now it’s only 5. Who got my other 9.5 sheep?!”

I mainly made the joke just to watch someone squirm at the mention of the number of sheep per person, because at the time many Kiwis were still uncomfortable with the topic. The truth is that while sheep numbers have been declining for forty years, the human population of New Zealand has also been rising: New Zealand’s population was only 3.2 million in 1982, and had risen to 5.1 million by 2020. Obviously the sheep-to-human ratio had to change.

In my defence, I should point out that I wasn’t being a jerk: One of the best ways to get over a sort of cultural squeamishness is to joke about it. Insults, including ones made by Aussies, lose their power if we’re the ones making the jokes. But, then, I’m an immigrant, so it’s entirely possible I simply don’t get it. But I also know that I don’t get 9.5 sheep that I got in in 1995.

And, that’s a wrap for this year’s “Ask Arthur” series. While I’ve always found these series fun, interesting, and/or educational to work on, they’re also a lot of work. Interest in the series ebbs and flows, and this was a low year. I seriously considered making this tenth annual series the last. On the other hand, this series used to be a good way to beef up the number of my posts at the end of the year, a time when I used to try to hit an annual average of one post per day. I haven’t hit that goal since 2018, and this year will be my lowest full-year annual total ever—and not dramatically higher than the three and half months I blogged in 2006 (this year will have had an average of fewer than one every other day). On the other hand, this series did help make December my “most blogged” month of 2022, so, there’s that, I guess.

Huge thanks to Roger and Sherry in playing along and asking questions. I hope I wasn’t too sheepish in my replies.

All posts in this series are tagged “AAA-21”. All previous posts from every “Ask Arthur” series are tagged, appropriately enough, ”Ask Arthur”.

Previously:

A decade-long inquisition
Ask Arthur 2022, Part 1: Speaking in the House
Ask Arthur 2022, Part 2: Indepen-dunce
Ask Arthur 2022, Part 3: Ranking choices
Ask Arthur 2022, Part 4: Helping Ukraine?