Willy Trolove: It’s no bull that cows are taking over the country

We need to keep an eye on our cows. I know this might seem like a strange thing to hit you with on a Monday morning, but its strangeness does not in any way detract from its truthfulness.

Back in the 1980s, New Zealand was a land of sheep. They sprawled over our green and brown hills like the dandruff on your Uncle Bert's sports jacket. You could hardly drive anywhere without getting caught in a mob of moving mutton chops.

We loved sheep so much that Rob Muldoon doled out the dollars to encourage farmers to grow more of them. Mike Moore told us that the lamburger would make us rich. Even the Australians, who weren't exactly lacking in sheep of their own, were so jealous of our national flock that they made sheep jokes about us. Some of these were even funny.

Back then, this country had 3 million people and 70 million sheep. Using a complicated process called long division that used to be taught in schools (thanks to the NCEA, nobody seems to know what is being taught in schools now), we can calculate that there were about 23 sheep for every man, woman, and person of non-specific gender.

Today, we have 4 million people and only 40 million sheep. In 20 years, your personal sheep quota has plummeted from 23 to just 10. If this decline continues, I calculate that by the year 2021 there won't be any sheep left. (Warning: there's a chance that this statistic might not be accurate. The last time I did long division was some time in the 20th century).

There are many reasons for this decline. One is that New Zealanders are wealthier. When people get wealthy they buy a slice of the countryside because it is so beautiful and untouched, and erect a ruddy great seven-bedroom imitation Spanish villa to ruin it for everyone else.

That villa comes with a tennis court, a swimming pool, a four-car garage and 4ha occupied by a horse, two rabbits, three goats, four hamsters, several disposable pseudo-Grecian ornamental garden features, and a ride-on-mower named Mabel, all of which are on friendly terms with a large overfed labrador that thinks it's a person.

And so there is less productive land around to grow sheep.

But most of the reasons for the decline in the national sheep flock have to do with cows. Back when sheep numbers were high, there were just a few cows scattered about the place. They broke up the woolly monotony, mooed occasionally, and created convenient props for Fred Dagg to step into whenever he wasn't getting enough laughs.

Now New Zealand has more than 5 million cows, and their numbers are growing every day. If we're not careful, cows will take over the country.

That's bull, I hear you say, but think about it. Cows already outnumber us. They are bigger than we are. They have four stomachs to every one of ours. They have an off-road, all-weather capability that we can only dream about. And their speed and dexterity around the field are so good that they would make excellent loose forwards. (After all, they've seen a lot more number 8 wire than most No 8s.)

Most importantly, cows turn grass into foreign exchange. This is where their power lies.

New Zealanders love using their credit cards and taking out second mortgages. We splash out on DVD players, cars, Fijian holidays, and imported wafflemakers that get used precisely once before being shoved into a cupboard alongside sandwich presses, toastie-pie machines, muffin ovens, pizza grillers, crumpet toasters, breadmakers, and Swiss fondue sets, all of which have also been used precisely once.

Last year the nation spent a whopping $9.4 billion more than it earned, or 6.4 per cent of our gross domestic product. In days gone by we turned to our sheep to pay these bills. We lined up a few million of them, sheared them, and sold the wool to some shivering Third World country, such as Britain.

But wool is no longer popular. Now everyone wants to flounce around in Lycra. The only thing standing between us and international bankruptcy is cows.

That's right. Those seemingly docile ruminants, chewing their cud and farting their way into the Kyoto Protocol, are holding our nation's future in the bulges of their udders.

Sooner or later, it is these udders that pay for everything from your new mobile phone to that extortionately expensive petrol you put in your car last week.

Yes. We need to keep an eye on our cows. They are getting too numerous and too powerful for my liking. If we're not careful, soon all the sheep will be gone, and those big black bovines will be running the country.

Ewe herd it here first.