A truck carrying 8 000 live chickens overturned on a Swedish highway on Tuesday, sending a sea of fluttering poultry on to the road and forcing authorities to shut it down for more than nine hours, police said.
About one-third of the chickens, on their way to be slaughtered, either died in the 4am local time crash or were run over by cars afterward, police spokesperson Stefan Jarlhage said.
Several thousand surviving chickens escaped from their cages and covered the E6 highway, one of the main roads on Sweden’s west coast, he said.
The driver of the truck was only slightly injured, Jarlhage said. No other vehicle was involved in the accident, which took place about 50km south of Goteborg, Sweden’s second-largest city. It was unclear what caused the truck to overturn.
”The driver was too shocked to be questioned by police after the crash,” Jarlhage said.
The road was still closed in both directions early on Tuesday afternoon as police and rescue workers tried to remove the chickens, sanitise the road and raise the truck back up so it could be towed. — Sapa-AP