Oversized planters were installed on a popular parkrun route in Gravesend, forcing organisers to cancel at short notice. More here: bbc.in/3VVtODM

In April 2001 a calf born on Good Friday lay for five days under the bodies of her mother and the rest of the herd the government had just killed, eating the straw off the floor, and when the farmer found her alive the Ministry of Agriculture announced that she had to die. Clarence Farm was 35 acres in Devon, with 15 cattle and 30 sheep on it. None of them had foot and mouth. They were killed because they lived next door to a farm that did. That was the contiguous cull: the disease was found on one farm and the animals on the farms around it were killed as well, sick or not. The model behind it came out of Imperial College, from Roy Anderson and a young epidemiologist called Neil Ferguson. The government took it up in March, and from then on the army and the ministry vets were going through the countryside at up to 92,000 animals a day. Farmers chained their gates and stood behind them. The pyres burned on hillsides from Cumbria to Devon, and in some villages the smoke closed the school. Philip and Michaela Board's white calf was a week old. The vets had been and gone, and somehow she had not been finished off. She was found curled against her dead mother. The vets tested her and found no disease at all. A ministry spokesman said: "Phoenix has to die. This stand will not alter what we have to do." The Boards ordered the vets off the farm. They had named her Phoenix. The newspapers put her on the front page, and the National Farmers' Union, which had backed the slaughter from the start, said that killing her would make Herod look like a humanitarian. Within 48 hours Downing Street announced that she would live. Within days the policy changed with her. Healthy cattle on neighbouring farms could now be spared if the vet judged them safe. The government called it a refinement. By the end, more than 6 million animals had been killed for a disease confirmed on 2,026 farms. The chief of the government's own animal disease laboratory at Pirbright called mass culling scientifically unsound. By July, Ferguson was telling Reuters that the three-kilometre and local sheep culls had had some effect but were not particularly efficient policies. Nineteen years later Ferguson's model told the government to lock the country down. Every hill farmer who lived through 2001 remembers the smell. The calf that survived it is the only reason anyone in Westminster ever had to look a healthy animal in the face before signing it off.

The fact that we domesticated wolves but never figured out how to negotiate with geese is one of humanity’s great unfinished projects.