Đàn bò náo nhiệt

Một nhà nông tại khu vực Alps của Pháp đang bị đưa ra toà do đàn bò của ông ồn ào quá đáng. Láng giềng nói chuông đeo trên cổ đàn gia súc tại ngôi làng gần thị trấn Annecy khiến họ thức giấc hàng đêm. Phóng viên Hugh Schofield tường thuật từ Paris:

Michel Deronzier grazes his herd of 70 dairy cattle on fields just outside the village of Villaz, in the pastoral bliss of a French Alpine mountainside. Several of the animals wear cowbells - not for decoration, he insists, but for the very practical reason that they can be more easily located if they stray.

But several of Monsieur Deronzier's neighbours have had enough. They say that the constant chiming of the cowbells is stopping them sleeping, and now one of them has filed a suit at the courts demanding that the herd be kept away.

Monsieur Deronzier is naturally furious, but he might be comforted if he knew that his case is far from unique. In recent years across France there's been a series of law-suits over such rustic nuisances as the crowing of cocks, the quacking of ducks or the clanging of church bells.

It's a reflection of the changing sociological face of the French provinces. Most of the law suits are filed by a new type of rural inhabitant: former town-dwellers who've come in search of the silence and instead find life in the countryside disquietingly loud.

Hugh Schofield, BBC News, Paris

dairy cattle
bò sữa

pastoral bliss
hoàn toàn hạnh phúc ở vùng thôn quê

stray
bị lạc

the constant chiming
âm thanh vang lên thường xuyên

law-suits
vụ kiện pháp lý, đưa vụ việc ra toà

rustic nuisances
những mối phiền toái ở vùng nông thôn, gây khó chịu cho người khác

sociological face
các ứng xử trong xã hội

inhabitant
cư dân địa phương

town-dwellers
dân thành thị, dân thành phố

disquietingly
gây khó chịu, bực bõ