As a species we have so much to answer for in the way we treat animals, but the largest single cause of animal suffering must be the way we factory farm, transport and slaughter billions of animals around the globe - year after year. I find it hard to understand how anyone can countenance keeping hens in cages or pregnant sows in narrow stalls, unable to turn round.
Thankfully, more and more people are rejecting the products from animals kept in these grossly unjust ways. The free range market is growing fast.
It's the global god of free trade which is responsible for the long distance transport of farm animals, with all its associated suffering. The statistics are shocking. Every year about six million animals are transported around the European Union, either to be fattened up prior to slaughter, or for slaughter at abattoirs hundreds of miles from home.
Before the mass protests of the mid 1990s, the UK was a major player in this trade, annually exporting nearly half a million week-old calves to be reared in narrow crates in continental Europe, and well over a million sheep for slaughter, often in countries where humane slaughter methods never got beyond the paper they were written on.
Filmed investigations have repeatedly shown that even the basic EU rules about resting, feeding and watering the animals are regularly flouted. Journeys can last for two days or more.
I have seen umpteen images of lambs frantically licking at the condensation droplets on the bars of their trucks as the internal water system is not working - or has never been filled. I have seen exhausted sheep panting from heat and dehydration, others fallen down and trampled on. I have seen hungry cattle in desperation eating a crude liquid mix of their own excreta and straw from the floors of their trucks.
I am appalled, angry, saddened and outraged. How can we allow this kind of dreadful suffering to carry on, just because free trade takes precedence and because, somewhere, someone is making a fast buck from the suffering of their fellow beings?
I have just helped Compassion in World Farming launch their bus advert campaign, which, alongside a photo of bedraggled sheep in a truck, carries the slogan: "They can't ring the bell when they want to get off" - as they surely would.
The UK live animal export figures have fallen dramatically over the last 15 years, but they have started to climb again. We've recently - unbelievably - sent calves all the way from Cumbria to Spain probably to be reared in conditions illegal in the UK.
I invite all readers to support this campaign by visiting the Compassion website www.stopliveexports.com.
The animals' voices have not been heard. Let's make our voices loud enough to create real change.
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Joanna Lumley shouldn't be required to curb the live animal trade
so there would be a huge rise in man made alternatives resulting in a greater use of plastic and more pollution.
with out the animals there would be no manure so all crops would be grown with either man made fertilisers or human manure.
no farmer is going to keep animals that are worthless.
the loss of these animals will have an impact on the environment and wipe out many breeding birds in this country
all hillsides will become scrub or forest. grasslands and pastures become crop fields filled with insecticides .
many farm buildings go and without the animals we have a reduced environment for birds like swallows and martins.
but they dont care
Use the tactics as per the Gurkhas. Good luck.
By eating cheap, processed meats you may be saving money in the short term but the long-term impact on your health, the environment and animals will end up costing much more.
Helping animals and helping humans is not mutually exclusive; at the core is compassion for all living beings. Johanna Lumley has campaigned for Gurkha's rights in the UK. You can be a human rights activist but you still have to eat three times a day, why not eat as compassionately as possible?
People are struggling in the UK and food needs to be as cheap as possible but the cost of treating livestock animals as humanely as possible should be squarely placed at the foot of the supermarkets. They are the ones profiteering, leaving the consumers, farmers and the animals losing out. Maybe if enough of us started using the power we do have; consumer power, the rightful perpetrators of this abhorrent treatment of animals would be put right. We always have a choice.
That would be absolutely fabulous
Toddlepip
We keep animals in cages. But then we also keep humans in cages. Maybe we could devise a way of letting at least some of them out. By using one as cheap labour to tend for the other. A reduction in sentence and something constructive to do. In return for helping to improve the lives of those prisoners of commercial conscience.
"licking at the condensation"
Wasn’t it one of the Dragons? Who instructed her employees to levy a compensation charge, against any company delivering “damaged goods”. In order to concentrate that carrier’s mind on the standard of service required.
"bus advert campaign"
Maybe Richard Dawkins would care to climb aboard.
There probably isn’t a god. But that doesn't mean we need compete with the other feller.