Duh! We should have ordered Lamb Chops!
Right after the gang I work with ordered Chinese food for lunch delivery today I came across this story:
450 Sheep Jump to Their Deaths in Turkey
ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) - First one sheep jumped to its death. Then stunned Turkish shepherds, who had left the herd to graze while they had breakfast, watched as nearly 1,500 others followed, each leaping off the same cliff, Turkish media reported.
In the end, 450 dead animals lay on top of one another in a billowy white pile, the Aksam newspaper said. Those who jumped later were saved as the pile got higher and the fall more cushioned, Aksam reported.
"There's nothing we can do. They're all wasted," Nevzat Bayhan, a member of one of 26 families whose sheep were grazing together in the herd, was quoted as saying by Aksam.
The estimated loss to families in the town of Gevas, located in Van province in eastern Turkey, tops $100,000, a significant amount of money in a country where average GDP per head is around $2,700.
"Every family had an average of 20 sheep," Aksam quoted another villager, Abdullah Hazar as saying. "But now only a few families have sheep left. It's going to be hard for us."
Yup, we were too late to order lamb chops in lemming sauce.
But seriously, if sheep are really that fluffy, why did so many die? Wouldn't the first few have cushioned the fall for the others? Now if only the first one had taken a ewe-turn .... I wonder if they were on their way to the baa-baa shop to get sheared? Actually, a few of the more polite sheep in the herd survived. They kept telling the others "After ewe!"
Okay, I was going to be serious. It's tough, though, so I hope I'm not asked to do the ewelogy.
