There were scenes of carnage yesterday after a lion got loose and mauled several people at the annual Rochdale Pride event.

One eye witness said, “I knew something had gone wrong because my friend turned and said, “That’s gone wrong”. We were having such a nice day as well. I’d had 2 Lion bars and was looking forward to a choc ice.”

An event organiser that lives in a £200,000 home near a field told us, “The Pride event is one of the highlights of the Rochdale calendar. It commemorates the time a lion save the town from the great flood of ’84. Often we have people confusing it with Gay rights and being a bit disappointed but that’s later on in the summer.”

But many campaigners see this as further evidence that you shouldn’t allow lions to just wander around central Rochdale for one weekend a year. One, who collects antique glassware and won a Spot the Ball competition in 1985 told us, “We’ve been warning that something like this might happen. It’s totally crazy letting lions walk around a town like that. A few years ago all the police horses disappeared during the Pride march. The organisers tried to make out they’d gone on their holidays to the Serengeti, been kidnapped and then ransomed off. They even held a fund raising event to get them back. It was obvious those horses were actually eaten by lions.”

It isn’t clear yet if this will be the end of Pride for Rochdale. We contacted a medium to find out. She told us, “I see an empty chair. There is a small child dressed in a sailor suit. There’s also a man with a mullet and a shell suit. He’s wrapped an XR3i round a lamp post.”

At this point we ended the discussion after it became too graphic. Instead we will hold a reader poll to determine if Pride should be abandoned.

Fact checked by Snopes; Plagiarised by Andrew Neil; Nancy Sinatra's favourite Rochdale satirist; sued by Chris Froome and winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.* *Not all of these necessarily true.