Swiss Watching trivia, No 3: Cows

August 3, 2010, No comments

Cows

Cows are an essential part of the Swiss landscape. In total, there are 1,597,000 cattle in Switzerland (about half of them milk cows), which is only 40,000 more than the number of pigs. But pigs will never be a Swiss icon because they don’t spend their summer holidays up in Alpine meadows posing for photos. In fact, there’s only room for about one-fifth of all Swiss cows in the high pastures; the rest must stay down in the valleys and endure the heat. The most common native breeds are the Brown Swiss, the red-and-white Simmental and the black-brown Herens, used in cow-fighting contests in Valais. The typical black-and-white Fribourg cow actually died out in the 1970s; the ones in the fields today are crossbreeds.