This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

As many as 500 cows have been stolen from a New Zealand dairy farm in what is believed to be the largest cow theft in the country’s history.

Residents in the town of Ashburton in the South Island said they had never before heard of cattle rustling on such a massive scale. And that’s in a nation that is home to some 10m cows, more than double the number of people.

The farmer who owns the herd posted a plea for information on Facebook on Monday (it was shared over 500 times), but was too embarrassed to talk to the media about what happened, according to friend Willy Leferink.

Leferink said the 500 milking cows could have been taken from the herd of 1,300 any time between early July, when they were last counted, and late August.

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The Federated Farmers Dairy Industry chairperson, Andrew Hoggard, said the theft was the largest in “at least the last couple of hundred years”.

“My guess is that the 500 cows have been butchered somewhere for illegal meat sales. Most of the stock theft we see in New Zealand is for illegal meat. My concern is how and where they could possibly be butchering this many animals hygienically.”

Hoggard said farms around Ashburton had been targeted for stock theft last year and farmers increasingly felt police were not taking the crimes seriously.

“These cows [the 500 stolen] are worth NZ$1m. If a bank was robbed of that much there would be an uproar, but police don’t tend to see stock as cold, hard cash. But it is extremely serious. Theft on this scale will put huge pressure on their business and could potentially spell the end.”

Hoggard said he believed the cows were probably stolen in small trucks over many nights, and that possibly the infrastructure of the farm allowed them to be targeted, if their stock-loading facilities were a good distance from the residential quarters.

New Zealand police declined to be interviewed about the theft.