Although the islands are remote and therefore safe from most human activity and pollution, several introduced species of both flora and fauna have damaged the environment; the feral cattle, in particular, graze on young and regenerating plants and trample on bird eggs.

A gun might go off by mistake, a wounded buck might charge, the cattle might trample you, or a fall on one of the smooth boulders might result in a fractured thigh, yet we were never less than eighty miles from a doctor, and often over two hundred miles away from one.

He planted "passalongs" - the cuttings, roots and bulbs from other gardeners - in beds next to the house, hoping the cattle wouldn't trample them.

Mr. Holtshausen, a Unilever executive in Durban, is far more sympathetic to the subsistence farmers of Zululand, whose cattle trample pans and stream beds, because he knows they are barely eking out livings.

Emhain Macha is still the residence of the kings of Ulidia, but it has grown shabby and cattle repeatedly break down the earthen dun and trample the burial grounds of princes.

On Earth, if one farmer was raising corn and another cattle, if the fence between their lands was broken the cattle would eat and trample the corn.

"No cattle have trampled the plain on this side of the city," said he.

Originally the border that divided the men today was a simple wire fence that cattle routinely trampled.

If not managed sustainably, cattle can cause major soil erosion, trample vegetation, and pollute river systems.

And he conceded that cattle should not have been trampling and defecating in the springs that flow into a salmon-spawning stream.