Viva!
- In: Heather Supports
The biggest cause of animal abuse is meat eating and that’s why Viva! campaigns for a vegetarian and vegan future – encouraging and helping people to make the change. Founded in 1994, we promised to be a champion for the animals and have been just that – our dramatic growth enabling us to wield real clout and take on the giants.
By covertly filming in the dark places that the meat industry would sooner keep secret, we have shattered the myth that farmed animals have ‘the best welfare conditions in the world’. In fact, the opposite is true - most animals live in the filth and squalor of overcrowded, disease-ridden, windowless sheds. The industry calls them ‘indoor intensive units’. Everyone else now calls them factory farms.
We have taken our cameras into slaughterhouses and to sites – legal and illegal – where animals are killed according to religious ritual. What we have proved is that all death is brutal and there is no such thing as humane slaughter. A tragedy when you think that one billion UK animals every year have their lives forcibly taken – 55 billion across the globe. But Viva! is fighting back and has had some great victories.
It’s easy to pretend that cruelty only happens abroad but it doesn’t. And it’s even easier to pretend that the nearly one billion animals killed for food in Britain each year don’t deserve our care and concern. They do, as the vegetarian and vegan campaigning organisation Viva! made me aware. Their secret filming inside Britain’s factory farms and slaughterhouses and the publicity it has generated has exposed as a sham the claim that we have the highest animal welfare standards in the world. “I love Viva!’s energy. Every time I contact them and I need some information to push something forward, they’re just so informed and do such great work – Viva! is making such a difference. I’m proud to be a Patron of Viva!. Heather Mills
