One little boy killed 443 chickens!

This kid looks a lot like a nephew of mine... anyway, that's not the point...

A little boy in China was frightened by a dog. His screams caused a huge chicken stampede. As a result, 443 chickens were killed.

I feel really bad; the father was charged 230 US dollars... This is a heck of a lot of money for many Chinese people... it could be 9 months worth of labor just because of a very unfortunate sequence of events.

From Reuters here:

Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in east China — and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a four-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog, state media reported on Wednesday.

A villager was quoted as saying the little boy bent over the henhouse window, screaming for a long time, after being scared by the dog.

“One neighbor told police that he had heard the boy’s crying that afternoon and another villager confirmed the boy screaming by the henhouse window,” the newspaper said.

A court ruled the boy’s screaming was “the only unexpected abnormal sound” and that 443 chickens trampled each other to death in fear.