Madam, – The Christmas festive season is an apt time to reflect on how we treat our farm animals. This is the period, after all, in which the industry goes into overdrive, slaughtering several billion animals across the planet over a four-week period.
A system of production that denies basic rights to billions of animals deserves to be held up to intense scrutiny, yet here we are, once again at Christmas’s door, and instead of radical reform of a hideous industry, welfare standards are being further driven down in the race to produce the maximum number of animals on the cheap.
Every time the system breaks down (BSE, Foot-and-Mouth, Avian flu), we hear much about the economic repercussions, the threat to human health and the plight of farming families, but little if anything about the unnatural production systems and the animal welfare requirements for which legislation sets such low barriers.
It is time for a rigorous investigation of these secretive, hidden industries. Animals are complex, sentient beings, yet we treat them as if they had no rights. In truth, they are more like us than many of us care to contemplate. – Yours, etc,