The cow is, for all intents and purposes, the national animal, ubiquitous on T-shirts and postcards and various other Swiss paraphernalia. Bovines feature prominently in the nation’s exports: a rainbow of cheeses are manufactured in Switzerland, often by hand in small alpine huts.In Swiss cow country, it’s easy to feel that you’re in a land left behind by time. Farmers still take their cows up to the high mountain pastures, called alpages, every spring and bring them down in the fall, in rites like something out of a storybook. The cows are outfitted with their best leather collars and enormous clonking bells, the farming families put on traditional outfits, including dresses and shirts flocked with edelweiss, and they all walk together up to the alpages, where no roads go. When they walk back down in the autumn, the cows wear festive hats, often floral affairs or even small pine trees sporting paper pom-poms