For a lot of us, “chicken” is a piece of white meat that’s better for you than a piece of red meat. Because really, how often do we see a chicken if it’s not on our plates?

But there was a time when we were intimately connected with livestock and fowl, a relationship evident in our most important stories and our popular culture, from Chicken Little to the Biblical parable of the lost sheep to “Old Macdonald Had a Farm.” We come from people who used to be able to tell two sheep apart.

“In modern times most of us have lost connections with the land and the livestock that sustain us,” says New Zealand photographer Cally Whitham. “Instead of