Monday, 6 December 2010

Animal Magic

JuliaM has alerted me to two new stories.

As we observed in November's Central European Cow Attack Round Up, deliberately causing traffic accidents is the cows' new modus operandi (besides the tried and tested 'kicking farmers and ramblers to death'). From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Police say a cow standing in the middle of a road caused an accident that killed two young brothers and a 45-year-old woman, and left three children injured near Halls Creek in northern Western Australia.

The crash occurred at about 9.30pm (WST) on Thursday night when a ute driven by a 24-year-old man with two passengers heading west on the Great Northern Highway hit a cow and swerved onto the wrong side of the road, colliding with a sedan carrying a 45-year-old woman and two children heading east.

The drivers were both killed instantly in the crash 93km west of Halls Creek, police said, while the 21-year-old brother of the ute's driver later died in hospital. Police said the woman's car caught fire with a five-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy trapped inside until a passing motorist pulled them from the wreckage.


By some unknown mechanism, animals appear to be able to communicate between species and coordinate these attacks across the globe. From the BBC:

A swan landing on the A12 in Essex caused two cars to collide as the drivers tried to avoid hitting it, police said. The accident happened near Rivenhall on Sunday morning.

The driver of a Mercedes, a man from Bury St Edmunds, was slightly injured. A woman from Colchester who was driving the other car, a Toyota, was uninjured. The swan was captured by police and held until RSPCA officers arrived to take it to safety.


Dude, WTF? "The swan was captured by police"?? I caught a couple of old episodes of Heartbeat on ITV3 yesterday morning, but even the scriptwriters of that show wouldn't have stooped to that.

UPDATE: JuliaM in the comments points out that there was a scene in Hot Fuzz where the police are called out to capture an escaped swan. Yet another example of life copying satire, I suppose.

2 comments:

JuliaM said...

Cheers for link! :)

"Dude, WTF? "The swan was captured by police"?? "

They must have thought they were re-enacting a scene from 'Hot Fuzz'...

Woman on a Raft said...

It's a regular event north of the A120. Remember that thousands of swans come every year across the north of East Anglia to breed in the washes which run from the Wash down past Cambridge, almost as far as the M25. A number of them have a stupid idea of what a lake looks like or tend to fall out of the sky and then hang around looking stunned, probably short of calories. It doesn't stop them being bad-tempered as drunks and ready to fight with anyone. I don't know if it is true about them being able to break a man's arm with a single blow from their beak, and I'm not about to find out.

Wallabies, deer, unicorns, chimps, fen tigers, giant rocs, huge snappers in the ponds, escaped pythons, lost swans and exceptionally uppity geese....all in a day's work for the rural constabulary.

What I don't want to meet are the giant rats - and I mean huge, I thought they were coypus - which have realized it is easy living at the swan breeding ground at Welney. The swans are fed by the wildlife trust and the rats don't even bother to go after the cygnets or eggs; they just sit there, stuffed like cushions, with the spare food the swans miss.