Why this farmer’s son is going vegan (sorry, Dad)
Despite activists’ extreme tactics (and his own farming family), Morland Sanders finds good reasons to give up meat for January
Growing up on the family farm in County Durham, there was an unforgettable aroma of pig muck and red diesel – no wonder, really, given our task was to fatten livestock. These were very much the analogue days of animal rearing – my father spent his days, shovel in hand, complaining about slipped discs and falling pork prices – but it was a terrific childhood, and I loved being around our various charges. My best present to this day was a Jersey heifer, gifted to me on my 14th birthday.
Yet it was always a little perplexing having relationships, friendships almost, with animals that you knew were going to end up as meat – with you becoming judge and jury over their transition from being to burger.
I still have a curious relationship with meat. The smell of the farm has never left me. Now, I eat meat, but only every few weeks, conscious of the (no doubt disputed) evidence linking various cuts of animal to human diseases. On top of that, middle age has got me trying to be green. I’ve bought an electric car and cut down on flying – but what’s the use in that when I’m being told my diet is responsible for heating the planet? The UN reckons livestock farming creates 15per cent of manmade greenhouse gases – further information that led me to wonder whether I could really give meat up for good.
For the last two months, for Channel 4 Dispatches, I have been investigating veganism, the diet on everyone’s lips. My first stop was Vegfest in London – an exhibition hall rammed with some of the products that contribute to a plant-based food market worth £434million in the UK. I couldn’t move for lentils and love: stunningly tasty food that’s proudly cruelty-free, and warm people wanting to show me the increasingly trodden path to a lifestyle followers believe will save our health, the planet and, of course, all animals.
It’s a big commitment, however. A true vegan will go without meat and fish, dairy, leather, honey, even some beer and wine. Cheese would be my downfall, but the vegans ply me with a darned good alternative made from cashews not cows – enough, I mull, to help me give it up for good.
Robbie Jarvis, who went vegan in 2014, is absolutely typical of the people here. Young, friendly and lean… in fact I can’t find a vegan with a BMI issue at this event. “Veganism is the process of living a nonviolent lifestyle for the betterment of your health, the environment and the animals on our planet,” the 32-year-old remonstrates and, as I leave Vegfest, I do so with only one question: what’s not to like?
To answer that, I wanted to spend time with someone who has been fully signed up to the animal-free way of life for yonks. Cath Kendall is an icon in the vegan movement: vlogging, Snapping and Insta-ing her message to fellow converts around the world.
From inner-city Coventry, I meet her in the muddy fields of an animal sanctuary in Essex, where she’s taking endless selfies, arms wrapped around a bull rescued en route to the abattoir. She is incredibly engaging, but more intense than I expected: within minutes Cath, 29 and named this year as the UK’s “hottest vegan” by Peta, is interviewing me about why I’m not fully plant-based. She went on to explain something that forms the bedrock of a big way of thinking in the vegan movement: speciesism. Cath believes, like many other campaigners, that animals are subject to discrimination by humans, where they deserve equality. To her, there is no difference between diners enjoying a lamb chop or a slice of human child.
It may be difficult to get your head around, but grasp the philosophy of speciesism and you will begin to understand an increasingly strident aspect of the vegan movement.
Warwickshire farmer Brian Hobill is, reluctantly, well aware of the term. Since 2017, when activists from the vegan organisation Viva! secretly filmed conditions on his farm and the video, fronted by the organisation’s founder Juliet Gellatley, was put online, he has received “harassment, intimidation, hate-mail [and] death threats”.
Indeed, I’ve dipped my boots on hundreds of farms in my time, but never one that looks like this: surrounded by 2m-high barriers, solid steel gates and numerous CCTV cameras. My father, like Brian, was a pig farmer, but the two experiences could not be more different.
In her video, Juliet described conditions as like a “surreal vision of hell”. Viva! then began organising demonstrations in front of the farmhouse. The RSPCA reacted to Viva!’s footage saying while there were “no breaches of welfare legislation”, they didn’t endorse the low welfare standards on the farm.
But other industry bodies have come to a different conclusion. Red Tractor, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and a number of vets found no evidence of poor animal welfare. We have seen the inspection reports immediately following Viva!’s exposés. None of them raise any serious concerns about Brian, who says the affair has “had a big impact on my family”, fa although they did find some minor issues about administration and matters unconnected to Viva!’s allegations. The campaign against father-of-two fa Brian and Hogwood Farm continues. Viva! are now trying to persuade clients to drop his products, and have been playing their footage outside supermarkets in London.
Where the death threats came from remains a mystery. Viva! says it deplores all threats of violence, as “we are not extreme but a law-abiding campaign group that exposes e the shocking conditions inside British factory farms. Most of the suffering we have revealed is legal – which is why we expose it and why the Government usually fails to respond”.
Other vegan groups have waged battles against legal businesses. Farm animals have been stolen, butchers’ shops vandalised, diners in steak restaurants have been heckled and staff at abattoirs have been abused. In one particularly unseemly attack two years ago, a Kosher slaughterhouse became the site of regular protests: comparisons were then made between the legal slaughter of chickens and the Holocaust, much to the horror of Jewish staff.
There’s a feeling across many in the meat industry that activists are becoming more emboldened, and the police agree. Dispatches understands that over the last three years, counterterrorism officers have begun to focus on the threat from extreme vegan activists: the first time they have concentrated on them, rather than animal rights groups. It’s understood that officers are now advising various organisations within the livestock industry as to how best to protect themselves against possible attacks.
For me, this intensity of protest is counter-productive. I don’t, for one moment, doubt that activists are upset by conditions on farms
– but they need to protest against the industry or society as a whole, rather than going after individual, law-abiding farmers. Anti-Semitism, trespassing and stealing animals will never be the most convincing argument for a lifestyle that claims to be founded on love and compassion, after all.
The most compelling proponents for a vegan diet were those warm, inclusive, passionate people I met at Vegfest – and they’re why I will be signing up to Veganuary. Sorry, Dad.
To Cath,h thereh is no difference between eating a lamb chop or a slice of human child