New Zealand contains a vast army of sheep, which famously outnumber humans there. But the ratio is slowly trending down with the international decline of the wool trade. Government statistics show that the jokes are old: long-gone are the days when there were fifty sheep for every man. That said, with 23.6 million sheep and 5.3 million humans, it'll yet be a while before mankind outnumbers them.
By land area, New Zealand is about the size of the United Kingdom, but it has a human population 13 times smaller than the U.K. That means there's plenty of room for sheep. For close to 150 years, the sheep industry was the backbone of New Zealand's economy and numbers boomed — peaking in 1982 when there were more than 70 million sheep and just 3.2 million people. Before "Lord of the Rings" brought waves of tourists to the country, images of green fields filled with placid sheep against backdrops of snow-capped mountains dominated the country's marketing abroad.
The ovine decline means that Mongolia is now the country with the highest sheep-to-people ratio: about 30m sheep surround 3.4m people on its expansive steppes. Other countries with more sheep than people include Australia (which is in no positition to be making all those jokes about New Zealand in the first place), Wales, and Mauritania. China has the world's largest population of sheep—about 187m—but they have to be shared between ten humans each there.
Previously:
• The tartan sheep of Auchingarrich
• We are Fractal Sheep
• This sheep named Lovely is enthralled by classical music
