Campaigners have a beef with vegan festival held at shooting estate
‘Organisers happily profit from ticket sales to event which promotes extreme, anti-rural agenda’
A VEGAN festival has been criticised as “staggeringly hypocritical” for holding its event at a shooting estate.
Vegan Camp Out will this summer welcome 15,000 people to Stanford Hall in Leicestershire to hear speakers advocate a plant-based diet and condemn the use of animals by humans.
Speakers at the July event include “Earthling Ed”, who describes meat as “murder”, as well as the comedian Simon Amstell, Harry Potter actress Evanna Lynch, and Heather Mills, the former wife of Paul McCartney.
Previous stagings of the festival have hosted talks from activists who have served time in jail for their campaigns.
Meanwhile the festival’s longtime sponsor, the animal rights group Viva!, has campaigned against dairy, pig and poultry farming and claimed that dairy cows are “raped”.
Adult tickets cost £75 for the weekend with camping. A music stage will host grime artist JME and Reggae singer Macka B.
Owned by Nick Fothergill, a former Royal Marines officer and banker, and his wife Lucy, Stanford Hall is a Grade 1-listed stately home set in grounds which stages pheasant shoots.
After a day’s shooting organised for the Rungapore syndicate in January 2020, the participants enjoyed a candlelit meal accompanied by a piper.
Stanford Hall has also hosted meets of the local Pytchley fox hounds and, in the wider estate, practises arable farming .
Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, said: “It is staggeringly hypocritical for the Camp Out organisers to happily profit from ticket sales to an event which promotes an extreme, anti-rural agenda from the heart of the Leicestershire countryside on an estate that is steeped in both hunting and shooting.
“The beautiful countryside in which they have chosen to base themselves was shaped by hunting, shooting and livestock farming – the very activities that they are campaigning to stop.”
Livestock farmers have become the target of death threats and abuse from vegan activists in recent years.
In 2019 a Dorset sheep farmer won a restraining order against one activist after a campaign of prolonged abuse.
Stanford Hall told The Sunday Telegraph that it no longer welcomes hunts onto the estate. A spokesman said it was practising more sustainable farming, while encouraging a “shared vision of how to create a positive social impact around climate change, regeneration and collaboration”.
He said Stanford Hall is not “directly” involved in livestock farming, but that the wider estate includes a farming tenancy which undertakes both livestock and arable production.
“Stanford has developed a local vegetable-growing Community Supported Agriculture initiative with no-dig methods and a focus on soil regeneration. We are establishing an educational charity to encourage further regenerative farming practices, increased biodiversity, community activities and tiny homes.”
Vegan Camp Out said that no venue was “perfect” or “pure”. It said: “Practically all large outdoor sites are owned by landowners who farm, shoot or race animals and it is exceptionally challenging to find a venue that can host 15,000 people with no connections to animal cruelty.
“We worked hard to find a venue that had cut ties with hunting, and we succeeded in doing so. Stanford Hall is making steps in a positive direction and this should be celebrated.”