The friend of France's farmers, and now of their sheep? President Jacques Chirac, opening this week's annual agricultural fair in Paris, knows exactly how to play on the nation's nostalgia for its rural roots: drink beer, pat the beasts, and denounce last week's recommendation from France's independent food-safety agency that various bits of sheep even as young as six months should be excluded from the food chain, lest the brain-wasting malady—scrapie, in English—from which sheep can suffer may prove to be capable of infecing humans as bse, mad-cow disease, is.
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