A 2-year-old calf in the Indian city of Mumbai refused to get slaughtered by running away from the butchery house on New Year's Day. The calf was rescued by the members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, when he kept butchers at bay for nearly seven hours.

Come Christmas and one can find the Virgin Mary, the three kings and a few wayward sheep as the traditional Christmas nativity scene. But the nativity scenes in Spain have a smartly dressed peasant squatting behind a rock with his rear-end exposed. The statuettes of "El Caganer," known as the great defecator in the Catalan language, can be seen on the mantelpieces of collectors, throughout Spain's northeastern Catalonia region.

A group of workers at Turkish Airlines were so happy to be rid of the last of a batch of troublesome planes that they sacrificed a camel at Istanbul airport. The national flag-carrier admitted on Wednesday that the staff had slaughtered the dromedary and that chief of the sacrifice-organizing group had been suspended pending an investigation. The incident drew worldwide attention after Turkish newspapers carried pictures of the festooned camel before sacrifices and then the beast chopped up into meat chunks.

According to the National Geographic, firefighters in a Malaysian village recently had to remove an 18-foot-long python from the roadway. The python had managed to swallow an entire pregnant sheep and was apparently too full to move. Unfortunately the stress of moving the reptile caused it to regurgitate the dead ewe.

A novelty company in Snodnonia, north Wales has been awarded a $38,000 Millennium Award to convert sheep droppings into greeting cards and gift items. The BBC reports that Creative Paper Wales was awarded the contract for its Sheep Poo Paper project. The company will collect droppings from surrounding mountains in the region then sterilize it using pressure cookers and recover the washed and undigested fibers.