You couldn't make it up. Unless, of course, someone did make it up, which seems possible, considering that this little gem has been 小道消息 since May :

BEIJING: A village cashier in west China lost 12,500 US dollars of public money after it was eaten by goats.

The incident occurred last May, when the village cashier surnamed Zhang and his wife in Linjiawan village in West China's Shaanxi province were stunned by the scene when they saw their ten goats chewing the money, the state media reported on Wednesday.

The couple immediately slaughtered the goats and put together the cash debris taken out from the animal's stomach, saving 297 pieces of notes worth 12.5 US dollars each, reported the Xi'an Daily on Tuesday.

"We are considering exchanging more damaged cash for Zhang and will treat it as a special case after reporting the incident to superiors, in view of reducing farmers' economic burden," director of the currency issuance section of the apex bank, People's Bank of China, Hengshan County branch, Li Shengyang said.

The public money Zhang concealed underground in the sheep pen was paid by the government to individuals as compensation from the state project -- transporting the natural gas from the west to the  east -- which passes through the Linjiawan village and occupied some village fields.

Bummer for the goats.

Question: What was a "village cashier" doing hiding money by burying it in a goat pen? Does this strike anyone else as suspicious behavior? If I was thiking about secure places to store public money I don't think "goat pen" would be the location that leaps to mind. I might consider "banks", or "enormous steel safe" or even "locked trunk guarded by my shotgun-toting henchman, ah qiang and a brace of rottweilers". But probably not "goat pen".

Per "banks" as an option, that seems particularly useful to me. If Hengshan county has a branch of the People's Bank of China, they probably have retail baking too. Could banks in Shaanxi be so hopelessly corrupt that they can't even be trusted with deposits? If so, China's banking system has further to go than I thought.

Cashier Zhang and his wife had better hope the PBOC makes good on the exchange or the goats won't be the only ones to have come out of this badly.