Part 10: Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs
If Susan "Kills the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs", she harms or destroys the person or thing that gives her money, power, or advantage.
It also means destroying something profitable because of greed or destroying a reliable or valuable source of income or livelihood through stupidity or short-sighted actions.
Here are a few examples:
(1) "By closing the shop, Alex killed the goose that laid the golden eggs."
(2) "If you are not friendly to your customers, you'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."
(3) "If we don't protect our wildlife, we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."
The earliest known use of the phrase is in Aesop's Fables, a collection of short stories attributed to Aesop, a Greek storyteller of the sixth century BC.
In one of his stories, The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs, a man and his wife are lucky to possess a goose that lays a golden egg every day.
However, they soon begin to think they are not getting rich fast enough. They imagine the bird must be made of gold inside, so they kill it to secure the whole store of precious metal at once.
When they cut it open, they find it is just like any other goose, so they neither get rich all at once, as they had hoped, nor enjoy the addition of one golden egg to their wealth every day.
