A Lot Of Dead Alpacas

The Ministry of Defence has released figures relating to compensation to claimants “affected” by low-flying aircraft during the year 2005-2006. The amount awarded was £4.1 million, a huge increase over the previous year, when the sum was a paltry £760000.

Many of the incidents relate to farm livestock. The M.O.D. tells us that it’s “very unlikely that stock is hit directly and killed”, which is reassuring to a degree but not all that surprising, unless you’re farming giraffes, in which case it’s
still unlikely but not impossible.

It's well known that at the onset of Spring giraffes tend to get a touch exuberant and do a lot of leaping and bounding. The effect of a giraffe being sucked into an air intake is not something that’s easy to reproduce convincingly under stringent test conditions, but one can hazard a guess that it’s likely to prove fairly unpleasant for animal and aircrew alike.

More likely are occurrences of “huddling”. Many farm animals, from
sheep to more exotic breeds such as llamas and alpacas, are just as
likely to crowd together for mutual reassurance in moments of
danger as to try to make a run for it. Under these circumstances
it’s quite possible that a single Chinook landing a little
over-enthusiastically could annihilate an entire flock.

However, although it’s not difficult to see how these tragic events
can come about, the amount of compensation still seems extremely
high.

£4.1 million’s a lot of dead alpacas. Or giraffes.