What’s Bill Gates’ beef with flatulent cows?

‘Fart for freedom, fart for liberty – and fart proudly’, was how Benjamin Franklin put it shortly after founding the United States. It’s an injunction the cows of the developed world appear to have taken seriously: a strategy for liberation, executed brilliantly you have to say, that seems finally to have brought them to the brink of emancipation.

Last week, billionaire and long-time committed burger eater Bill Gates became the latest champion of the cows’ cause (namely: please stop eating us). He said the time had come for inhabitants of all wealthy nations to cease enjoying beef and instead to make do with a synthetic substitute. According to him, it’s the only way to prevent civilisation ending in a cow-fart fireball apocalypse. Or something like that.

Peaceful resistance has taken many forms over the course of history – Indians once spooked the British Army, for example, by doing nothing more than secretively passing chapattis to one another, and the simple act of communal singing in the Baltic states is said to have been the final nail in the Soviet Union’s coffin – but you’ve got to hand it to the cows for the genius of their strategy.