"Do you mind dogs?" Carolyn Press-McKenzie asks quite innocently. "I've got rather a large pack at the moment," she adds, in something of an understatement, as it turns out.
I don't mind them at all. Love them.
So she opens the door to her house at the top of a hill on her Kaoitoke Kaitoke farm, near Wellington, and what can only be described as a hairy wall of canine comes barrelling towards me. One of them has three legs, another has only one eye. One, with no amount of exaggeration, is as big as a small horse.
The peaceful, bucolic scene becomes one of slobbering, leaping, moulting dogness. Covered in hair and drool, I'm already picturing a bath. A hot one.
"They need a good walk," Carolyn bellows over the barking pack, so up into the hills we go.
There are 14 dogs in all at her animal sanctuary, if you count the two tiny puppies rescued the night before. But that's just the dogs. There are five monkeys, an emu, a few goats who think they're cats, several cats, including one with muscular dystrophy, horses, donkeys, two basking kune kune pigs, a cow and a flock of pigeons which do a circuit over her house every few minutes. I'm leaving out some, I'm sure, because Carolyn says she has about 50 creatures on the property...Continue reading, photos and video...
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