Green Party leader Zack Polanski has backed animal rights campaigners seeking a ban on CO2 stunning for pigs.
The politician joined animal welfare advocacy group Project Slingshot as it projected a video of pigs “being slaughtered inside CO2 gas chambers” on to buildings including Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge, Defra headquarters and the Tate Modern on Monday and Tuesday night.
Comedian Diane Morgan was featured in the video projected on to Buckingham Palace, asking ‘Does the king know about this?”
It comes as the organisation said it has lost faith in the government’s “hot air” pledge, made in December’s Animal Welfare Strategy, to launch a consultation into ending the practice.
“Ninety per cent of pigs in the UK are killed in CO2 gas chambers – a method so cruel that the government’s own Animal Welfare Committee has recommended it be banned,” Polanski said.
“The science is unambiguous, the public is waking up to this, and ministers need to act now,” Polanski added: “I’m proud to stand with campaigners shining a light on this issue (literally) and I will continue to push for the urgent reform that millions of animals deserve.”
The committee recommended that the pork sector should be “prohibited” from using CO2 stunning in October, with a transition to other stunning methods proposed within the next five years. However, industry voices have asserted that there is no commercially viable alternative.
Pressure building
The stunt was the latest in a series campaigns conducted by Project Slingshot, which also accused fast food giant McDonald’s of censoring online criticism of its pork supply chain this week.
The US multinational allegedly hid comments and slowed its social media uploads after the group directed its followers to ask McDonald’s to stop sourcing pork from suppliers using CO2 stunning. Project Slingshot said one McDonald’s Instagram posts attracted almost 800 comments, with actress Amanda Abbington among them.
“I heard you all support gas chambers to make the ‘food’ at your restaurants,” one comment said, and another, “do you use pigs gassed to death for your meat? I wonder if you’ll answer me!”
Project Slingshot co-founder Matthew Glover said companies like McDonald’s were hiding “the reality of industrial farming and slaughter behind misleading feel-good imagery and meaningless phrases like ‘high welfare’ and ‘best standards in the world’”.
“The pig industry knew more than 20 years ago that the government’s advice was to end the use of CO2 gas chambers for pigs,” he added. “It could have acted then but instead it made this method of slaughter the default, no doubt because it was cheaper.”
McDonald’s did not comment on Project Slingshot’s allegations, but information from the multinational’s UK website says it sources all its pork from RSPCA Assured farms.
The business also said its ‘Farm Forward’ programme aimed to support farm resilience, raise animal welfare and help farmers make their farms more environmentally sustainable.
The latest The Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare report, however, included McDonald’s in its list of businesses not ‘walking the talk’ on animal welfare
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