Rampaging goats accused of Nigeria election sabotage

That's the Reuters headline. Let's savor it again for a moment:

Rampaging goats accused of Nigeria election sabotage

That's the sort of thing that gives a chronicler of bad animal behavior the will to go on posting.

It's hard for a story to live up to a headline like that one, but here it is:

A Nigerian opposition party accused its political rivals of sabotage on Tuesday after its vice presidential candidate was forced to make an emergency landing due to a runway invasion by rams and goats.

Fola Adeola, vice presidential candidate for the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), and other party chieftains made the forced landing, damaging their plane, after airport staff in the northern city of Bauchi failed to control the beasts.

The Nigerian government denied the accusation of sabotage and even the description of the event in some sources as a "crash-landing." They say that the plane had already landed when the goats ran across the runway.

And there is some support for this downplaying of the incident in quotes by Adeola himself:

We never knew that our plane crash-landed until somebody told me. It was Ribadu who later told me that I had just escaped death.

Not much of a crash-landing if some of the passengers don't even notice, perhaps?

But even if the government is telling the truth that they weren't trying to sabotage anyone... A spokesman for the national air traffic agency said:

The report we have got from Bauchi is that up till three minutes before the aircraft landed, our men and the civil defence corps provided by the state had gone round the runway and certified it okay. It was just when the rear landing gear was touching the runway that some animals emerged from nowhere on the runway.

Human staff seems to have been doing their job. Did anyone think to ask what side the goats are on?


What happens when you let goats hang out with planes by Flickr user shaggyshoo.