By LEANNE ITALIE
Associated Press
NEW YORK – They’ve bitten their handlers, refused to budge from their beds and lost their shadow-casting jobs to potbellied pigs. And it turns out, not all groundhogs are really that good at predicting the weather.
Not even Bill Murray as a movie weatherman escaped a couple of nips from the furry rodents on the set of his popular “Groundhog Day” that put the annual shadow or no shadow ritual on a loop in 1993.
“Of course, the groundhog’s most glaring offense is that its legendary weather predictions are complete bunk,” said Linda Lombardi, a former zookeeper who has a blog and a book called “Animals Behaving Badly.”