The Silent Ark: A Chilling Expose of Meat - The Global Killer (Paperback)

A student friend was working on an agricultural project and needed to visit a model farm. I went along for the ride. If I was naive to think that hens would be strutting and scratching around a farmyard, all glistening feathers and clucking contentment, then I was not alone. The veil of silence which surrounded animal protection then, in 1979 - and which still does - had simply not prepared me for what I saw.

My vague notions of stack yards, scattered straw and wandering animals disappeared instantly. There were no animals to be seen, only a collection of ugly, windowless, industrial buildings which could just as easily have been do-it-yourself stores or engineering workshops.

We started in the pig house. As soon as I walked through the door, into an atmosphere cloyingly warm and damp and laced with the smells of 100 defecating pigs, the first nagging unease began to gnaw at me. There were no cosy sties, no wallowing contentment, just row upon row of individual concrete stalls, each pig separated from its neighbours, unable to touch them despite being only centimetres away.

These pigs, I was informed, were the breeding stock, the pregnant sows who would provide two and a half litters of piglets each year, each litter frequently running to double figures. Ahead of each creature was nothing but iron bars to which were clipped feeding troughs. Beneath their feet was slatted metal through which most of their excreta would hopefully drop. Howevere, when they urinated it splashed up from the floor, wetting the sides of the stall and the pigs' legs and belly. They would eventually lie down in it. I noticed that any movement tended to result in a scrabble to maintain a firm footing.

Around the middle of each sow was a broad collar with an attached shackle, securing her to the ground. With this restraint she could take little more than half a pace forward and half a pace back. Those sows who tried to lie down did so with difficulty.

When confronted with horror of this kind, there is always a tendency to explain it away, to excuse it, to want to believe that it cannot possibly be as bad for the animal as it appears. We're encouraged in this. 'Give them warmth, food and water and they're as happy as Larry', grinned our guide. I didn't believe it.

In fact years later I was to watch as a young sow was placed in a stall for the first time. As the tether was attached around her middle and the shackle secured to the floor, she threw herself against the restraint in a frenzy of squealing and panic.