Close Encounters of the Four-legged Kind
Carob Fever
A strange phenomenon occurs, during summer and early autumn months across the lower limestone regions of Cyprus, when free range animals like sheep and goats suddenly hear or somehow perceive that ripe carob beans are falling to the ground. Carob trees are ubiquitous throughout the agricultural areas of the island. It might be hot and sweaty work, but it’s lots of fun to experience what happens when you take a long stick and start bashing the carobs from the trees when animals are present anywhere within a 200-metre radius. Maybe it’s some kind of natural radar, but watch what happens:
It’s sometimes easy to make a new four-legged friend: all you need is a little carob-empathy:
Goats in the Dry Valley
Even though we live and feel like we’re in the so-called “Modern World” and even though Cyprus of the 2020s is so much more evolved (some might say the island has lost its “Cypriotness” or the native cultural identity has been diluted over the past decades), there are still semi-wilderness areas of Cyprus where you can just bump into rural agricultural activities that have been happening on the landscapes for centuries…no millenia. One such, is when you just happen upon a herd of free-range goats, as was the case in late October, 2020:
Cows in Cyprus?