Via USATODAY.com – Prosecution sought in death of domino-toppling sparrow:
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — The Dutch animal protection agency demanded prosecution Tuesday for the shooting of a sparrow that knocked over 23,000 dominoes during an attempt to set a world record.
The ill-fated bird flew into an exposition center Monday in the northern city of Leeuwarden, where employees of TV company Endemol NV had worked for weeks setting up more than 4 million dominoes in an attempt to break the official Guinness World Record for falling dominoes.
The common house sparrow — of a species on the national endangered list — was chased into a corner and shot by an exterminator with an air rifle.
“Under Dutch law, you need a permit to kill this kind of bird, and a permit can only be granted when there’s a danger to public health or a crop,” said agency spokesman Niels Dorland. “That was not the case.”
They thought it was a domino demonstration, but they ended up creating a recreation of Mousetrap. The only way this sequence might have been better is if the sparrow had been a cyclone started by the moving wings of a butterfly.