Pigs in crates, cows on concrete, chickens in cages, lambs rammed into a lorry – animals have been turned into machines.  Baby animals torn from their mothers, fattened, mutilated, pumped with drugs. They then finally  end their miserable lives murdered -  in the greatest massacre of all time.  Each of these creatures has the same complex feelings as the cats and dogs that share our homes; each has their own families and communication systems;  each one is a unique individual with their own personality, and each values their life, as we value our own. Yet these billions of individuals are imprisoned and tortured like products in factories, simply for having the misfortune of being born into the body of a ‘farm’ animal.  Even so-called ‘free-range’ animals are simply in a marginally better prison; they also suffer a violent and terrifying death in the slaughter-house. And because the killing is hidden away, the public are lulled into buying the faceless corpses neatly cut into bits and cling-filmed.

Many people do not realise that farming animals for food causes more global warming than all of transport combined; that it erodes the rainforests, obliterates species, fills our rivers with pollution, and rapes our oceans to extinction; that only a diet free of animals’ flesh will sustain the soaring world population;  that it is a serious risk to human health – causing heart-disease, cancers and diabetes.  Will it take the next ‘Mad Cow disease’, ‘Swine Flu’ or ‘Foot and Mouth’ to finally convince us that ‘meat’ is a murdered body, and rife with disease?

For more information about farmed animals, visit:

www.animalaid.org.uk

www.viva.org.uk

www.vegansociety.com