What is the campaign about?
It’s called Are You an Animal Lover?, and launched in February 2024 with a stunt by Viva! Campaigns. The controversial stunt saw deceased cat and dog replicas and a real pig corpse strung up on butcher’s hooks at iconic London locations including the London Eye, Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus and Parliament Square, while members of the public were asked “Can you eat meat and be an animal lover?”.
The launch was designed to challenge people’s perceptions of how they view animals. Using their relationships with their beloved family cats and dogs was a very powerful way of doing this.
We also launched a website “Are you an animal lover?” including a video: What’s the Difference? And produced new campaign materials given out across London to be followed by across the UK.
What was the main aim?
To save millions of farmed animals by persuading meat eaters to go vegan or start/continue their journey to veganism.
Really? That many?
Yes! If this stunt converts even one person to becoming vegan, it will save thousands more farmed animals lives in future. By being vegan, a person is estimated to save about 11,000 animals over 30 years.
You’ll have seen on the launch video a woman who ate pork, immediately pronouncing she was going vegan. Over half of the people we spoke to said they’d either eat less, or stop eating, meat. More important is the impact on the millions of people seeing sympathetic and thought-provoking news articles.
If just 100 people go vegan, over 30 years that will be 1.1 million animals not eaten. If 500, that’s 5.5 million.
How? By reaching the meat-eating public directly, but much more importantly, through the positive publicity created by the stunt.
How much media did you reach and was it sympathetic?
To date (15 Feb) we have reached about 110 million meat eaters, mainly in the UK but also abroad. The coverage was overwhelmingly sympathetic and all but one, quoted Juliet Gellatley in full.
This news article in MSN was repeated almost identically in the national Express online and in major regionals such as Wales Online, Bristol Live, Nottinghamshire Live, National World News, as well as sizable newspapers such as the Tribune in India and so on.
What was the passersby response?
Viva! Campaigns wanted to evoke a powerful response from passersby as they were confronted with the reality that the pigs, and other animals, they eat are very similar to their beloved cats and dogs.
The stunt caused a stir, with a few members of the public expressing their disgust. But most found the event to be powerful and meaningful, with about half deciding to reduce their meat consumption and prompting insightful conversations with campaigners – who also provided leaflets and resources to help people go vegan.
One woman (who ate pork) was upset at seeing the pig – it hit her for the first time the pain she was causing – and she decided to go vegan on the spot.
You can’t compare a pig and a dog
Yes, you can! Pigs are one of the most intelligent species on earth. They are smart, and sometimes smarter than, dogs, primates and dolphins.
Pigs are incredibly playful and just like puppies, piglets will scamper, jump, hop, play-fight, push and run after each other! Adult pigs will run and dance with joy when given the freedom to do so. They also wag their tails when they’re happy!
Pigs are highly sensitive and emotional. They pick up on the emotions of other pigs in their group and can feel empathy for them in the same way as other socially complex species, such as dogs, wolves, great apes and ourselves.
Pigs are extremely tactile and love nothing more than a good back scratch, massage or belly rub!
But, whatever their intellectual or emotional complexity, all animals should be respected and not slaughtered!
Why this stunt? Why use a real dead pig?
Because these attention-grabbing tactics are needed now more than ever, with factory farming and slaughter becoming more prevalent in the UK and worldwide.
The dog and cat were replicas and were clearly so. The pig had to be real to have any effect. So, we tried various routes to obtain the pig which failed and had the tough choice of whether to buy a dead pig from the meat trade. We thought very long and hard about tactics, from the animals’ perspective, as we always do.
- Would the poor one pig being bought privately from the meat trade make a difference to other animals?
- Would the stunt reach millions of meat eaters?
- How would Londoners respond?
- Would the media portray our POV and therefore be persuasive to the readers/make them think about their hypocrisy etc?
- Would we create more vegans and how important is it to do that for the animals?
- What is the bigger picture?
- Would buying the pig make any real difference to increasing the industry’s profits – or would it in fact, decrease them through the stunt causing people to reject and reduce meat?
- Ultimately, would the pig who had been killed by the meat industry want to be butchered and eaten or used to help save other animals, and then cremated?
I donate to the charity Viva!, did my money pay for the pig?
No. The whole stunt was paid for privately by a small handful of donors who supported the stunt, via Viva! Campaigns Ltd, a completely separate company to the charity Viva!.
Isn’t this stunt extreme?
What we think is much more extreme is the fact that over one billion land animals are killed for food in the UK each year , with 85 per cent of these animals spending their lives imprisoned in factory farms.
Hundreds of millions of animals are tortured in factory farms in Britain, every year. Chickens collapse in pain because they are bred to be obese. Pigs are trapped in crates to give birth. Dairy cows have their babies ripped away shortly after giving birth. They suffer.
Hundreds of millions of animals are also gassed to death. This figure includes 11 million pigs, causing agony as the carbon dioxide gas forms an acid on their eyes, nostrils, mouths and lungs. Viva! Campaigns state that the animals’ pain is conveniently swept under the carpet, and we performed the stunt to raise awareness of the suffering of all animals who are farmed for food.
