Going down with the sheep: New Zealand rabbits hop aboard some woolly friends to flee floods

Three wild rabbits managed to escape rising floodwaters in New Zealand by clambering aboard a flock of sheep and surfing to safety on their woolly backs.

Sixty-four-year-old Ferg Horne said he had been farming since he left school at age 15 and had never seen anything quite like it.

He was trudging through pelting rain to rescue a neighbour's sheep from the floodwaters on Saturday at their South Island farm near Dunedin when he spotted the bedraggled rabbits hitching a ride.

"They must've jumped up onto their backs to get out of the flood. There was two on one sheep and one on another. They were as happy as can be those rabbits; they were warm and dry, snuggled up," he was quoted as saying by the Stuff website.

He said he herded the sheep to higher ground. The rabbits clung on for a while, but as the sheep jumped through the water, they fell off.

"There was a wee hedgerow there and I looked back and there they were climbing up into the trees," he said.

He said all the sheep - and rabbits - survived.