Conservation Comment: Island breed brings benefits

It seems that these days the media are full of news about the damage that cattle are causing to New Zealand's environment.

Stories are frequently accompanied by images of cows committing various ecological crimes. All that's missing are mugshots, complete with numbers across the bottom, to complete the impression that cattle could qualify as environmental enemy number one.

So, for me, the concept of cattle being used as conservation tools took a bit of getting used to, but Guernsey, where this column is being written, has a conservation herd.

First, a bit of background. Guernsey is an island of only 63.38 sq km off the coast of France. If you rearranged its triangular shape it would probably fit quite comfortably into the built-up area of our city. It has a population of around 60,000 and still finds room (roughly 25 sq km) for agriculture.

The agriculture is mostly dairy. Over the years, intensification and changes in land use have led to the loss of almost all grasslands and heathlands and the botanical variety they provided.

La Societe Conservation Herd has been set up by La Societe Guernesiaise, a local environmental protection group, to halt this loss on some of the island's most important sites.

The herd comprises a small group of Guernsey steers from local dairy farms. They graze La Societe Guernesiaise's nature reserves and land owned by the States of Guernsey.

They are moved from site to site and reduce the dominance of rough grasses. This encourages wild flowers and insect populations which, in turn, can create habitats for bats, other small mammals and birds.

Because of their diet, the steers grow more slowly than farmed cattle do, and when they reach mature weight, their short lives as environmental celebrities end at the abattoir.

What is the point of this column? (I hear you thinking.) Well, first, there are lots of different ways of approaching conservation, and second, the cattle are not the guilty parties in New Zealand's environmental degradation.

Yes, journalist and former Whanganui Federated Farmers president Rachel Stewart is absolutely right. New Zealand does need to get rid of 80 per cent of its dairy cows, but the pictures that accompany the mayhem that industry is wreaking on our environment should be of the farmers that have made the decisions to use their land to hop on the dairy bandwagon. The cattle are just doing what cattle do.

At this point, I must confess to an affection for cattle. They seem to be without guile or neuroses. I guess that figures if you are a large herbivore in an age when most natural predators have been eliminated. But it still seems a little strange to think of them as environmental heroes.

Possibly, in the age of climate change, a more worthy, if less nostalgic, project for the Guernsey group would be to equip one of their reserves with a series of monitors, make it a "no go" zone for humans, and see what nature does left to its own devices.

- Lorna Sutherland has lived in many different places and observes the changes in the natural environment around her.