A Japanese company has been importing sheep from Britain and Australia and reselling them as Poodles to unsuspecting Japanese dog lovers. The unwitting customers of the inventively named "Poodle" company have been parting with up to £800 a pop for the masquerading sheep. Suspicions were aroused when one high profile customer, a Japanese movie star called Maiko Kawamaki went on a national talk-show and expressed concerns that her new poodle didn't bark or eat dog food. This was also backed up by another couple, who after taking their "poodle" to have its claws trimmed, were informed that this would be tricky considering the animal had hoofs.
Police believe that more than 2000 people have been duped into buying sheep. They have excused the victim's ignorance, with the fact that sheep are rare in Japan and not many people know what they look like. Presumably though, they know what a bloody poodle looks like!
Fear not, the unwanted sheep are not destined to end up in some new Japanese dish, however they have been donated to many zoos and farms. Hopefully raising the profile of sheep around Japan and thus avoiding another instance of this nature.
popular concerts According to our user reviews, 1987-07-08 - Brussels, Belgium is the best bootleg we have in our collection. Our users also think that 1993-08-28 - Dublin, Ireland was a great concert since it appears the most in the list of favorite concerts.
news headlines We cover the news of many international U2 websites including U2.com, the most popular headline in the last two weeks was 'U2 rocking O2 Arena ... as the support act' from atu2.com.
did you know? Bono received an Honorary Knighthood from the Queen of England (March 2007) and a France's Legion D'Honneur, presented by President Jacques Chirac (2003) for his humanitarian work.
popular songs Where The Streets Have No Name is the most-requested song from the song pages and quite popular. According to the favorite song lists of our users, Bad is the all-time favorite song.
notable live performance A great performance of Bad from the The Unforgettable Fire album was played in Milan, Italy on 1992-05-22, according to user AllBecauseOfU2.
statistics There are currently 4,745 topics started on the forums with over 208,098 messages.
More than 13,268 fans are a member of U2start. The average age of the U2start users is 29, only users who submitted their age are included in this figure.
latest site news Jeremy, known as haytrain here, is the latest addition to the U2start crew. Jeremy will be a crew member specialised in bootlegs, he will mainly work on maintaining our bootleg collection, making it even better, more r.. (read more)
new fan around us The most recent fan who registered is named u2fanatic, welcome to U2start u2fanatic! As a new user you can introduce yourself in the Welcome to U2start y'all forum.
fan of the month Every month we put an U2 fan in the spotlights, the fan of this month is user drewhiggins. Every fan of the month has an interview with us, you can read our interview with drewhiggins here.
bootleg of the month Every month we have a bootleg in the spotlights, the current one took place on 1989-12-27 in Dublin, Ireland. You can download this bootleg, read reviews or write your own review here. You can also join the discussion on this bootleg in our forums.
high resolution photos We have 696 high resolution U2 photos available for you, the biggest photo collection you will find. The latest photo we've added is 'October'.
"The Irish poets gave me a sense for language and for the sound of language, the sense that's in the word, in the sound of the words, things like that."
- Bono
