The farmers and butchers fearing for their livelihoods
Vigilante activists are stepping up their attacks on many British farms, finds Peter Stanford
Farmers have long worried aloud about their livelihoods, but a growing number are now speaking openly about a different sort of threat – to their lives. An attack this week, in which a farm shop near Exeter was daubed with “Murder!” and “Go Vegan!”, is, they say, just another example of a rising tide of verbal and physical abuse from militant protesters.
Matt Carter, 35, a fifth-generation Devon farmer, said he and his staff at Greendale Farm Shop in Farringdon had received anonymous death threats after announcing a promotion that offered customers the chance to pick their own Christmas turkey and look after it until it was slaughtered.
One caller, identifying himself only as part of the “vegan mafia”, warned that the protests would continue until Greendale abandoned the “murder, marketing and profiteering of innocent animals”. A spate of similar incidents across the country has raised concerns of a return to the sort of violent pro-animal activism seen in the Eighties. Back then, its targets were pharmaceutical and research facilities. This time, it seems, farmers are the ones in the protesters’ sights.
In June, “Stop Killing Animals!!” was painted on the shop front of Marlow Butchers in Ashford, Kent, along with the Animal Liberation Front logo (though the organisation disowned the action). That same month, Wesley Omar, a 23-year-old investment banker, was sentenced to community service (and lost his job) after breaking in and “liberating” a piglet from a Leicestershire farm. Earlier this year, Jimmy Doherty, the celebrity farmer, said he had received death threats on social media.
The National Pig Association claims its members “cannot sleep” at night for fear of attacks, while the National Farmers’ Union has advised against “direct engagement with animal rights activists”. The Association of Independent Meat Suppliers has even met with national counter-terrorism police over the activities of some of the more active animal rights groups.
Luke Winton, a young Welsh dairy farmer, highlighted the resignation of many in his industry with a tweet that went viral in the summer: “I’ve had another bunch of verbally abusive vegans threaten me this evening. Being a dairy farmer, you get used to it.”
The attack on Greendale Farm has prompted other farmers to air their experiences of ransacked premises and anonymous abuse, such as messages pinned to windscreens saying “go die”.
Adding to their sense of being under siege was the proposal this week of a 79 per cent tax on sausages and bacon, and 14 per cent on steak. This aims to cut demand for red and processed meat, and so save the NHS millions of pounds in treating the cancers, heart disease and type 2 diabetes linked in studies to overconsumption of such products. The study, published in the journal PLOS One, said it could reduce food production-related greenhouse gas emissions by 1.2 per cent.
It may come as a surprise to those farmers that the Vegan Society – the first of its kind when it was founded in 1944, and now representing 600,000 UK vegans (1 per cent of the population) – shares their misgivings about the “meat tax” proposal. Sam Calvert, the society’s spokesman, says: “We would much prefer, if the Government wanted to act, that it would remove the subsidies on animal farming, and transfer them to the growing of plant protein that is needed for a vegan diet.”
Calvert, too, is crystal clear in disowning threats against farmers. “We are about compassion and kindness to animals – and we include human animals in that,” she says, adding that “we oppose violence, abuse and causing damage, but we do support peaceful campaigning”. She points out that the current climate of abuse can cut both ways. This week, after the Devon farm shop attack, her society has received messages accusing it of being a “terrorist” organisation. High-profile vegan activists, “Earthling Ed” and “Joey Carbstrong” have also spoken of threats against them. Whether these had any more substance than the suggestion last week by William Sitwell, editor of Waitrose Food magazine, of commissioning a series on “killing vegans, one by one” is hard to discern. Sitwell said he was only joking, but it cost him his job.
So how to stop this apparent remorseless upping of the ante? Some farmers, while having no truck with violent protesters, acknowledge that a succession of crises – over BSE, foot and mouth, salmonella and E.coli – have dented public trust and provided added impetus to those who argue that raising animals for food can never be justified. “There is a lobby of people who are angry,” says one West Country meat producer, a champion of ethical, sustainable farming methods, who asked not to be named in case it attracted the attention of militants. “They want to discharge their venom against something. Attacking farmers has become a vehicle for that angst.”
He says that many family farmers have far more common ground with “the rational vegan population” than either side might care to admit. “We, too, are disillusioned by a meat industry driven only by profitmaking,” he says. Almost 90 per cent of poultry farming in the EU, according to the Vegan Society, uses intensive methods, with birds kept in battery huts with little light or space.
Further evidence that the growing number of vegans – up fourfold in the UK since 2011 – and those smaller farmers and producers committed to sustainability could achieve more by working together is provided by the rapid expansion in sales of vegan and vegetarian products, up 85 per cent since last year, Waitrose reports.
Farmers such as Jamie Keeble are getting in on the act. The 28-year-old is one of the founders of HECK, an upmarket sausage-making business that grew out of the family farm in Yorkshire and has been a big hit in our supermarkets. It has now added a plant-based, gluten-free, high-fibre range, certified by the Vegan Society and launched in Asda and Sainsbury’s to coincide with World Vegan Month.
“In part, it is a commercial move,” says Keeble. “With the bad press that sausages get around health, and an increasing number of people cutting down on meat, or cutting it out altogether, we saw a market to bring the flavour back into veggie sausages with real plants as ingredients. But we are also responding to the way that the militant vegan movement is gathering momentum.”
The bigger picture remains cause for concern. “I was raised on sausages every day on the farm. Now I don’t eat as many, and my girlfriend and her family are all vegetarians. Who knows if we will still be eating meat sausages in years to come?” he mulls. “Though I don’t think I could ever give them up completely.”
‘There are people who are angry. Attacking farmers has become a vehicle for that angst’