Are you an animal lover?

Pet Pampering

We spend £10 billion on our family pets every year in the UK. Little coats and fluffy beds, bouncy balls and squeaky toys. And what are pigs, chickens and cows given to improve their lives? An old, deflated football, if they’re lucky. It’s called ‘environmental enrichment’.

Royal Protection

Pets have a Royal Society and the King to protect them and hundreds of charities. Farmed animals have a mere handful of charities – of which Viva! is one. 

If someone complains about cruelty to pets, the perpetrator is likely to be prosecuted. If someone complains about cruelty to farmed animals – just one in 300 cases will be prosecuted. Not really fair, is it?

No Tears for T-Bones

A pig can play computer games. Chickens have a language. Cows have a strict social hierarchy. The result of thousands of years of evolution. Pets are (mostly) cherished, have comfortable lives, live for years and are mourned when they die. A billion UK farmed animals are slaughtered every year – mostly while still babies – and many people don’t bat an eye.

Pants on Fire

You are constantly lied to about the conditions in which farmed animals live: “The best animal welfare in the world,” “We love our animals,” “They wouldn’t grow if they weren’t happy.” And you grab hold of these lies and believe them – because it’s convenient and puts your mind at ease. But do you really believe them?

Pig in Hell

Pigs are highly intelligent – even more intelligent than your dog. And, yes, they can play simple computer games, using their snout to manipulate a joystick. Yet over 90 per cent of them are factory farmed. “Ah ha”, you say, “I’ve seen them out in fields with huts for shelter!” Yes, about half of UK pigs are born outside but at three weeks old, they’re bundled up and dumped in indoor industrial units where they live with thousands of others, often hundreds to a pen.

Mutilations

They live on slatted floors through which their excreta is supposed to drop but never does entirely so the stench takes your breath away. To give birth, most mums are locked into cages barely bigger than their bodies, with certainly no space to turn around, for four weeks or more. They can’t mother their babies and are little more than milk machines. Their newborn piglets frequently have their four main teeth and tails clipped off without anaesthetic and are taken from her at three to four weeks old. Then it’s back to the rape rack for the mothers and artificial insemination, again.

Cannibals

It’s difficult for factory-farmed pigs to sleep due to severe overcrowding and bedding. They live in sh*t, they breathe in sh*t and they lie on sh*t (and despite common belief, pigs are clean animals and hate sh*t). They have nothing to entertain their bright minds and lead a life of utter frustration – under these torturous conditions they often turn cannibal and try to eat each other alive.

It’s a Gas

When they reach a whopping 110kg, larger than an average adult male, they are allotted 1 square metre in which to live – just imagine that! Diseases are rife, they are dosed with antibiotics and killed at just five or six months old. Most are gassed to death, fighting and screaming as an acid forms on the pig’s eyes, nostrils, mouth and lungs and would feel as though they’re burning from the inside out.

Broiler (meat) Chickens

25,000 to 50,000 in one shed: 19 birds per square metre: less space than an A4 piece of paper per bird. And they live on urine-and-faeces-sodden litter that can burn their flesh. Heart failure, broken bones, starvation, disease and death in every single shed. If they were pets, there would be an outcry. And, yet, chickens make gorgeous pets.

Are You a Hypocrite?

Are we really calling you a hypocrite if you say you love animals and yet you eat animals? No, we’re not, because there are too many other voices telling you it’s all okay when it really isn’t.