Flock of Poultry; £60

I thought it was rather sad when the Aardman archive warehouse burnt down. All those hours of work, all that expression of talent, melted into an ex-plasticineic goo.
Nick Park - the daddy of Wallace, Gromit, the chickens on the left, the creatures interviewed for Creature Comforts - would have been excused for being disappointed and angry, but when the press asked him for his comment he surprised them.

it was "dreadful" news for the company, but in the light of other world events, "it's not a big deal".

He's right, of course - but there are places where a flock of poultry could be quite a big deal for some people.
Rwanda. It's sort of a place where you think of the whole country as being just a giant news-story, all to horrible to contemplate, but I suppose there are people there laughing right now, people there crying, people there praying, people there working... Their lives go on, somehow. I can't quite imagine how.

The family "Send a Cow" talk about here are an example. One woman, bringing up 6 children - 5 of them orphaned during the gut-wrenching genocidal people-culling that put the name of Rwanda on the media map (although can you point it out on a map of Africa? I have to think about it for ages, and still get it wrong more often than not). As if that's not bad enough, she's got AIDS - another word that carries myriad spectres with it. She's not going to have the time to keep a herd of cattle - especially with no free schooling for all those children - but poultry (apart from our animated friends in the picture here) are rather less effort.

Eggs to eat and eggs to sell. Better diet, better health. It's got to be a start worth getting.

[ Send a Cow catalogue, www.sendacow.org.uk ]