NEWSWIRE.COM 14/11/2000 - Adopt a sheep on line

If you thought you'd heard every conceivable use for the Internet, think again: there's a Web site in Italy which allows you to adopt a sheep online. For €183 (A$300) a month, you can log on, name your sheep, check how it's doing and watch it graze (presumably via a sheep-cam). Why would you want to? Well, European consumers are becoming more and more anxious about where their foodstuffs are coming from, especially about scrapie, the sheep equivalent of BSE or 'mad cow disease'.

Having your very own sheep guarantees that the cheese, wool and even the droppings (garden fertiliser) that are delivered each month are all wholesome and organic.

But whether clients will want the sheep converted to mutton after a year of watching its progress, remains to be seen. Manuela Cozzi, who owns the remote farm in Abruzzo where the sheep live, said that his aim was "to give people in the cities a new sense of faith in what we are doing". He added that "clients will once again have direct contact with the origins of what they eat". One of the first clients to adopt a sheep was Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, the Italian agriculture minister (whose middle name means "shepherd" in Italian), who said he hoped the Web site would restore consumers' "confidence in the quality of produce". (Europe Wire hopes readers are impressed that we managed to get through this story without mentioning New Zealanders even once.)

http://www.newswire.com.au/apcweb/news.nsf/HTML/AllHeadlines/38ACB372EEC255BBCA256995007BD4A4