Culture

French Farmers Took All Their Sheep To The Eiffel Tower Because They Keep Getting Eaten By Wolves

Makes sense.

by Maddie James  28 November 2014

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

Every now and then a news story breaks that is actually pretty grim but has too many whimsical elements for anyone to take it seriously. According to the ABC, a group of French farmers have brought dozens of sheep to the Eiffel Tower to protest rising numbers of wolf attacks. There’s just so much going on here.

After wolves in France were hunted almost to extinction in the 1930s, the 300 remaining wolves are protected by the government, which seems fair enough except that in August there were 4,800 wolf attacks. Makes you wonder if they’re all pulling their weight and attacking 16 sheep a month of if there’s just a small gang of wolves making the rest of them look bad. But that’s 1,000 more attacks than last year, so farmers are mad.

They’re dressing up like wolves, and making delightful comments to reporters like “there is nothing natural about being eaten by wolves”, and “we are against wolves”. They’re going to do this until they get a meeting with agriculture minister Stephane Le Foll. His delay in responding is probably related to the fact that they apparently want to bring their sheep with them to the meeting, because how could he resist giving in to all of their demands with cute sheep to back them up?

For a relatively small protest about a local issue, the story has received widespread international coverage (e.g. the ABC covered it), primarily because of the opportunity to make the same joke.

 

Eventually the novelty will wear off. Until then, French sheep farmers… stay strong.