Roger's tasty sheep

A few years ago, Peter Singer said eating New Zealand lamb was defensible - even for an animal-rights utilitarian. The animals live a joyful life, have one bad day at the end, and graze on land that wouldn't be suitable for grains anyway.

"I think that there is a defensible argument for saying that if the purchase of Canterbury lamb is a necessary condition for lambs to have what is for 99% of their existence a really good life and even the bad days are not like a day of being tortured for 24 hours... I do think that that ... would be a defensible diet."

Roger Beattie's gotten rid of the 'one bad day at the end' part. His lambs aren't mustered and hauled to the works; they're shot on-paddock.

Away out on the south side of Banks Peninsula, where the wind gives the tussocks a permanent bend and the next stop is Antarctica, a group of small dark sheep move slowly up a hill.

They graze, but also lift their heads and test the air, wary of some presence they can't yet fathom.

Suddenly a shot rings out, and the half-grown lamb loitering on the edge of the group drops to the ground. The rest scatter, helter-skelter, up and down the slope, as two men come loping down.

The men sling the animal between them and start toiling back up the hill.

The sheep are Pitt Island wild sheep, or pihepe, as the farmers, Roger and Nicki Beattie, have named them.

This lamb will become part of the latest venture by the entrepreneurial couple; Wyld lamb.

Grown sustainably and ethically without chemicals in a wild environment, the sheep are then served up in some of the best restaurants in the country.

The lambs are shot, rather than go through the stress of a muster, and a trip to the freezing works which makes them all the tastier.

And with pihepes there is no drenching, no dipping, no vaccinations, no penicillin.

"They have a very happy, wild, carefree life until bang, they are on the dinner table. There isn't a less stressful or more organic, ethical system for producing meat than that," Roger Beattie says.

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