Then they are transported from factory farm to livestock market and finally to the horrors of the slaughterhouse. Some animals even have to endure the long, stressful and hazardous haul to markets abroad, often in extremes of weather, without adequate provision of food, water, air and light, to places where conditions are often much worse. Then they are finally put out of their misery in the most barbaric manner.Without doubt, the greatest single cause of animal suffering in the UK is food production. Vegetarianism is the only humane and civilised answer.

Each week in the UK, thousands of people from every walk of life are continuing to drop meat and fish from their diets. The vast majority of pigs in the UK are reared intensively which leads to such diseases as pneumonia, meningitis and swine vesicular fever, while 10 to 15 per cent suffer from lameness.
Livestock makes use of one third of the total landmass on earth.
About 26 per cent of the UK's total global warming methane emissions come from livestock.
"While we are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites, how can we expect ideal conditions on this earth."
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) - Playwright and Critic.

Better for the environment

A vegetarian diet is much better for the environment and meat and fish production is without doubt contributing to damaging our planet irreparably.
Methane-emitting livestock contribute to global warming and the 'Greenhouse Effect' -- roughly about one-quarter of all methane emissions come from this source. Ammonia from animal waste and agricultural fertilisers contributes to acid rain, which kills aquatic and plant life. Intensive grazing causes soil erosion and nutrient depletion, which harms plant life and in some cases renders the soil infertile, creating vast, barren deserts where previously there was fertile land. Livestock cultivation makes inefficient use of limited resources. It takes up to ten kilos of vegetable protein to produce just one kilo of meat. While it takes only 900 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of wheat an incredible 100,000 litres are needed to produce a single kilo of meat. Clean and safe water is not an inexhaustible resource and it is becoming ever more scarce.

Yet in certain cases, people in the developing world go hungry and thirsty while grain and water is squandered on rearing animals for food, often destined for markets in the developed world.This recklessness goes on and is responsible for killing and endangering rapidly disappearing animal and bird species. Such operations also threaten indigenous human populations, whose long-established ways of living vanish or become damaged forever. The extent to which the world's oceans are fished has decimated fish populations to the point of near extinction of many species. The world's seas are being fished to the point of collapse and in the North Sea alone, cod and herring numbers are now at dangerously low levels. This is despite the fact that some of the world's seas close to industrialised areas contain potentially lethal cocktails of toxic waste and effluent some of the results of which can be seen in the open sores, cancerous tumours and deformities found on some captured fish.The fragile eco-systems of the world's oceans continue to be ruined and coral reefs and other habitats are being destroyed.