How to tell the difference between horses and cows

When horses were introduced to Britain in 1873, there was great public outcry. Among the protestors were every member of the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Royal Family, but nobody was able to prevent Jason "Horrible Martin" Waterfield importing five thousand of the creatures by ferry from Hungary. Taking advantage of the fact that none of the police and army officers stationed at the docks with the express purpose of keeping horses out of the country had ever seen a horse before, Waterfield was able to convince them that his large wooden boxes contained an unusual kind of land-based porpoise.

Even though Wilberforce, whose knowledge of equine biology was limited to hearsay and a badly-translated Latin text, had imported almost exclusively male horses (as well as three cats, eight trees, a Bulgarian woman and, ironically, an unusual kind of land-based porpoise, believing them all to be horses), they still managed to breed and spread around the country, causing most confusion among cattle-farmers who found it difficult to distinguish between their cows and the stray horses that wandered into their fields and climbed into cowsheds through the skylights.

To ease this agricultural crisis, the government issued a book entitled "How to tell the difference between horses and cows", and passed a law making its purchase compulsory for everyone in Britain over the age of nine and a half. The first edition of this book was of limited use to anybody, although it is now a very desirable collectors' item. Written by junior minister for colonial development Hamish Zmed, who had never in his life dared to leave London and had had little experience of either horse or cow as a result, the book limited itself to recounting anecdotes about parliamentary life and the activities of Zmed's next-door neighbours.

Following a series of public protests and assassinations of authority figures, a second edition of the book was issued. Although it again provided no help to anyone wishing to tell the difference between horses and cows, it provided a comprehensive list of the ways in which the two animals are similar. There is some repetition (the fact that both have four legs is mentioned twenty-seven times) and no sense of structure or order to the lists, but the information is entirely accurate, and remains popular today among those who for whatever reason need to enumerate ways in which horses can be compared to cows.

The author of this second edition can not be definitively identified. It was published under the pseudonym "Of Plaintive Griven", which may be a printing error, some kind of code, or the unusual real name of someone who otherwise made no impact on history. Every Prime Minister for the past century has claimed to be the author, but none of these assertions can be given any real credence. The most likely answer is that there was in fact no author, and the book was not in fact written at all.

A third edition is to be published next year, promising to answer at last the much-vexed question of how one can tell the difference between horses and cows. Although modern technology and more than a hundred years of experience have made it possible to do so with ease, the publishing house Gossamer Tripe believe there is still a market for a volume describing in detail the ways in which the species can be told apart. Parliament is currently refusing to answer any questions on whether this new edition will have government backing or whether it is a private enterprise. The identity of the author is also unknown, from which it must be assumed that the book will be written by a trained octopus, as happens all too often nowadays.