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Sat 10 Jul, 2004 03:52 pm
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union knows the precise number of cows grazing its fields, but not the number of citizens in the 25 member states, its chief statistician has been quoted as saying.
Michel Vanden Abeele, director-general of statistics agency Eurostat, told Belgian newspaper L'Echo on Saturday that the EU's leaders should stop demanding unnecessary data.
"Because of the mad cow disease crisis, we know the exact number of cattle in Europe. By contrast, we can't give the precise number of people who live in the European Union," he said.
There were 80,587,601 cows -- 20,271,497 of them dairy cattle -- in the EU at the end of 2001, the most recent year for which full figures are published on Eurostat's Web site (http://europa.eu.int/comm/eurostat).
Around 450 million people currently live in the EU.
This would make sense as there are very few homeless cows.
Why discuss issues like the Iraq war and the situation in Darfur when you can as easily discuss the amount of cows in the EU? That's logic, right?
Lighten up Rick! I suppose we could also be talking about three headed alien babies.
Three headed alien babies? Where? I don't know the details, but it's a disgrace, I tell ya.
:wink:
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