Pui O, Lantau Island, is not a pretty place. Car corpses litter the landscape, illegal dumping of fridges, air conditioners and building material occurs with monotonous regularity, and farmers use everything from mattresses to old rusty metal doors to fence in their fields. Containers, painted in garish colours, stand about for no apparent reason. Metal fences, fencing nothing in or out, stretch meaninglessly along fields and roads like sentences without beginning or end. With China Light and Power’s never-ending digging along the South Lantau Road, leaving a row of empty holes festooned with orange lights, the picture is complete: Pui O is a depressing place indeed.

But we have two things that set Pui O apart and make living here worth while: One of the most beautiful and under-used beaches in Hong Kong, and a shimmering emerald swathe of wetland, populated by a clan of water buffaloes. These magnificent creatures make the wetland and nearby beach a perfect self-contained environment. The bovines keep the grassy swamp in perfect condition, mowing it with their teeth and fertilizing it with their manure. Egrets and other birds come from miles around to sit with impunity on the patient beasts’ backs. Tiny fish live side by side with purple water-dwelling flowers in the water holes, from which the water buffaloes rear up surreally, uttering their tiny un-buffalo-like yelps.
It is a joyful experience to walk across the wetlands every morning and see these indigenous inhabitants of Lantau going about their business, namely chewing the cud and wallowing in mud. At dusk they are given to galloping along the beach, throwing themselves into the murky sea with abandon. People come from near and far to view this truly amazing spectacle.

Apparently, in other places like Africa, tourists pay to see this kind of thing through binoculars. One would think that the Hong Kong government, so keen on making tourists "living and loving" our World Class City, would jump on the chance to entice tourists into our very Living Nature in Big City midst, bringing them so close to real water buffaloes that they can touch them. Instead we have Agriculture and Fisheries Department coming over to Lantau with their latest-technology stun-guns, rounding up the unsuspecting animals for summary execution. The buffaloes’ crime? Looking big and scary.

Now, I can see that a several-hundred kilogram buffalo can seem intimidating to the normal holidaying city dweller. However, rather than week-end campers complaining about big and scary animals ruining their Lantau holiday, it is surprisingly the locals, used to living side by side with buffaloes for centuries, who want the animals taken away. Interestingly, the first few buffaloes being taken to death row coincided with a small illegal filling-in of the wetland area. A less conspiracy-minded person would find it difficult not to assume that the ultimate goal of removing the buffaloes is to reclaim their habitat and paving it over with concrete. After all, there is all that land laying waste when so many useful things could be done with it like putting up yet another batch of Spanish-style, government bog-standard village houses.

Lantau water buffaloes go about their buffalo business like they have done for centuries, but suddenly there are complaints. Our new government, masters of their own house and fond of taking severe measures, react in the normal knee-jerk manner: Your buffalo offends you – tear it out! But what have the buffaloes of Lantau done wrong, apart from being? Killing these placid and benevolent beasts would be killing off Hong Kong’s last link to its agricultural past. These bovines have never harmed anyone. However, as usual, the government hides behind the shield of "public safety" to justify its irrational actions. We have cows occasionally crossing the road? Kill them all! After all, they are a serious threat to people’s safety. They could force cars to slow down, reaching their destination several seconds late.

In my fourteen years of traversing the South Lantau Road on foot or in a vehicle, I have seen cattle obstructing traffic less than a dozen times. Each time it was a question of the vehicle driving marginally more slowly while the cow got the hell out of there. On one memorable occasion I and several ecstatic fellow passengers on a bus were treated to the sight of two male water buffaloes fighting in the middle of the road, thus obstructing traffic for several minutes. However, it all petered out with one of them starting to urinate, whereupon they both ambled off. As for the perceived threat to people’s lives; not even the best efforts of my dog, a famous mangler and barker extraordinaire running madly around the cattle, daring them to attack, can shake these beings out of their equilibrium. All they do is walk away. Therefore one can assume that they will not suddenly attack a non-mangling human being armed at worst with a camera.
Trying to see the local farmers’ point of view, yes there is the aspect of buffaloes encroaching on farmland. But here in Pui O at least, I can safely say that every little plot of land is safer than Fort Knox. Mattresses, doors, metal fencing, barbecue forks and corrugated iron plates make the sacred fields impenetrable by man or beast. So why take away the beast?

It’s time that Lantau Island took its righteous place as the nature wonderland of Hong Kong. Developers are gnashing their teeth, calling the island under-developed, (all that green stuff when there could be high-rises! All that wasted woodland and wetland when there could be concrete!) and yes, Lantau Island is vastly under-developed. It is under-developed as a great opportunity to create a green haven for locals and tourists, not as the opportunity to build another high-rise new town. It is under-developed as a chance for nature-deprived children to see trees, flowers and animals close up, not as another sorry excuse to pave over, tear down and raze to the ground what little we have left of nature in the name of making a quick buck.

It’s time for the people of Hong Kong to stand up against greedy developers and complacent government departments blinded by cronyism, and start taking care of the few indigenous natural places we have left. So what if a car has to stop for a few seconds to let a beautiful bovine amble into the bush as fast as it can. So what if a few land owners aren’t allowed to fill up every inch of the land they own with concrete. At the end of the day, when every buffalo is killed off and every inch of natural soil in our city is concreted over, there will be no way to bring back our natural past. Lantau Island needs to finally be used for what it is: A fantastic opportunity for locals and tourists alike to experience Hong Kong nature at its best; past, present and future.