Quotes About Herders

In the 1980s reindeer meat still made a substantial profit. Every other activity, even when the real cost of anything at all was masked by the Soviet tangle of cross-subsidies and phantom accounting, ran at a severe loss. Though this was to change beyond all recognition in the 1990s, reindeer herders in the 1980s were fairly well paid and well provisioned, and their exotic holidays were provided free.

I am struck by the wild character of this land and, as the Kazak herders often do, I have the urge to sing.

The good times, when the rains came and made everything green, when streams of water suddenly raced through the dried riverbeds and there was milk and meat in abundance. She tried to teach us how that led to decadence: how when the grass grows green, herders become lazy and children grow fat.

The Masai, nomadic cattle herders in East Africa, meet their salt needs by bleeding livestock and drinking the blood. But vegetable diets, rich in potassium, offer little sodium chloride.

I am a caster of nets. Tyrants and emperors rise and fall. Civilizations burgeon then die, but there are always casters of nets. And tillers of the soil, and herders in the pastures. We are where civilization begins, and when it ends, we are there to begin it again.

The lights of Knoxville quaked in a faint penumbra to the west as must the ruins of many an older city seen by herders in the hills, by barbaric tribesmen shuffling along the roads.

Today green pastureland has dried up and turned to sandy plains, and the land provides little support to the herders, who can barely scratch out an existence in the semi-arid climate. Each day is a test of their survival.

contradict unquestioned beliefs of our culture: that the knowledge of good and evil, far from being harmful, is wholesome and beneficial; that agriculture is a blessing, not a curse; that no enmity exists between herders and tillers of the soil, and the foods they produce are equally worthy of divine blessing.

As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.

In towns, the nomads remain outsiders for a while. They become a class divorced from their occupation as herders. They are called drokpa in an undertone that indicates an unsophisticated, uneducated person, a person still in progress. In their own villages they are known to everyone for their horsemanship, their ability to round cattle, their weaving skills, for being a good child to their parents, or simply for their ability to make good yogurt and dried cheese.