Wrath of Cod (Part One)

Top conspiracy theorist Bob Dipstick has sensationally claimed that Britain's 2001 foot and mouth disease outbreak - which saw troops deployed to the North of England, supposedly to deal with the crisis, was actually a fake. "Just why did it take half the British army to combat a disease which is non-fatal to farm livestock and does not affect human beings?" he demands in the latest issue of My Conspiracy Monthly. "Just why was it necessary to burn thousands of animal carcasses to contain the spread of a disease which can easily be inoculated against? Just why were our coastal cities under threat from giant fish?" According to Dipstick, the astounding truth was that all over Britain animals had been turning on their human masters and viciously attacking them. In order to avoid mass panic, it was decided at the highest level to use the foot and mouth story as a cover. Not all of the attacks were fatal, or even violent. Indeed, the animals involved frequently exhibited an unnatural degree of intelligence, often seeming to desire to degrade and humiliate their masters rather than kill them.

In one incident, two farm workers from Hawkshead claimed that they had been ambushed on a lonely farm track by a group of farm animals, stripped naked and harnessed to a plough. They were then forced to turn the soil of a nearby field by hauling the plough across it (in driving rain) for over seven hours. A few weeks later, Windemere farmer Jake Grincombe arrived back at his farm house after a hard day toiling in the fields, only to find a horse - known locally as Big Dave - in bed with his wife. “The brazen bastard was lying in my bed next to my wife, smoking one of my cigarettes! He even winked at me!”, says Grincombe. “The wife later told me that the arrogant bastard had even tried to use my extra-large condoms, but they’d been too small and had split when he put them on!” At first incidents such as these were not taken seriously by the authorities. However, they soon escalated into a full scale insurrection across the whole of Cumbria - and beyond.