True, but what do -24 happiness mean? As long as your settlements stay above 0 happiness individually, not much - and the sheep can be used to save the ones that hover around zero from the penalty.
So you probably have to wait a bit longer for the next celebration, and that's it.
If you plunge half your towns into unhappiness (typically happens when I go 2 over the limit), that's a harder problem. And of course, things may go wrong. The wrong crisis may break out. That's what I like about this system, it's rarely easy to calculate the consequences of going over the limit. (Though it wouldn't hurt the game to make this part even more dynamic.)
