hawkes bay a&p

We made it to Hastings in time to visit the A&P show this afternoon – we thought we might do it tomorrow instead, but this’ll give us some extra time at the next destination, wherever that might be. Nobody seems to know what A&P stands for, though I think the A must be for agriculture.

Right inside the ticket gates, we caught the tail end of the sheep-herding trials. The border collies over here aren’t nearly as cute as Tucker, or, actually, nearly as cute as most of the ones in the States and the UK, based on the trials I’ve seen at home or on TV. They’re all really wiry and short-haired, maybe from mixing with another breed, or else they just all descended from a couple of wiry/short-haired border collies way back when, there’s a ton of within-breed variation. Anyway, they seemed to herd the sheep well, so that’s what matters here.

There were a ton of commercial exhibitors – AWD vehicle dealers, animal breeders, mobile vets, mobile butchers, as-seen-on-TV gadget peddlers, tractor salesmen, etc. We saw sheep-shearing demonstrations by an off-color Australian in the children’s section (and hoped the jokes were going right over the kids’ heads), wood-chopping competitions, winning fleece and alpaca wool, and champion poultry.

I’d seen in the paper that there would be miniature cattle there, and was very excited to see those – they were mini Highlands, furry things that stood maybe 2.5-3 feet at their shoulders, at most. I still have no idea what the purpose of miniature cattle could be, the brochure was no help in figuring that out and I thought it might be kind of rude to ask the breeder, but they seem even less useful than miniature horses, and I don’t think those guys have a purpose other than standing around looking cute.

My absolute favorite part of the whole thing was the petting zoo/kids animal exhibit section (no big surprise, right??). I learned by observation that ostriches are NOT to be petted (this could probably have been inferred by the completely enclosed cage without a ‘come on in’ or ‘pet me’ sign like all the other, but some people near us did not figure it out in time). There were ‘ginger fleeces’ from Iceland – oddly orangey-red lambs with cute little pink charm-collars (the fleece color was natural, but I’m pretty sure the collars weren’t). There were also several miniature horses and ponies, a super-furry donkey, goats and kids, ‘regular’ sheep, a pile of ducklings, and tons of colored chicks. One pen had a big sow and lots of piglets (too active to count), these were lots of fun. Half of the times I stuck my camera up to the fence to get an eye-level picture without having the chain-links visible I’d get a perfect little dirty snout-print on it from a curious piggie. The merino ram was also entertaining, though not overly friendly when we tried to hold it by its horns to search for its eyes, which were well-buried beneath all the wool. There were llamas and alpacas, and another favorite of mine – the Captain Cook pig and piglet. These guys were really furry, and had amusing facial expressions especially when something (a child’s hand stuck through the fence, for example) appeared to confuse them.

I have lots more A&P pictures that I don’t have room to post here, and will make a Picasa album with them at some point later on.