Cambodian Midget Fighting League
The Cambodian Midget Fighting League was featured in an alleged BBC article that claimed that forty midgets had a fight with a lion and lost, leaving twenty eight of them dead. The article was quickly proven to be a spoof and not actually written by the BBC. Despite this, it was still featured on The Ricky Gervais Show podcast (Series 1 Episode Two) when Stephen Merchant read the story to Karl Pilkington and Ricky Gervais without mentioning its phony status. Ricky thought the midgets deserved their deaths and injuries for exploiting an animal, and refused to blame the animal because it was acting out of instinct.
The creator of the article explained that:
"It was created to 'settle' a dispute between a friend of mine in which he claimed that 40 weaponless midgets could defeat 1 lion in a hypothetical fight. Many of my other friends and I tried to convince him that the lion would definitely win, but he would not back down from his argument. After seeing another fake article posing as BBC about 'zombism' in Cambodia, I got the idea to make this fake news article to try and convince him for the final time." 1