Put the spotlight on pigs and chickens

SEVERAL issues relating to animal welfare and animal rights have been in the news recently, among them the exposure of the notorious puppy farms, the ongoing campaign to ban live farm animal exports, and a more recent campaign to end the exportation of horses for slaughter abroad.

But there is a much larger issue waiting to be exposed: the institutional cruelty at the source of over 95% of our pig and chicken meat the factory farm.

I know from experience that many of those employed in the media have little regard for the animal rights lobby, dismissing them as extreme and out-of-touch.

Yet I suspect that were these same people to experience at first hand as I have the horrors of the intensive pig farm, or the assault on the senses of the battery hen farm, or the sheer scale of the overcrowded broiler chicken sheds, they would more than likely change their tune.

The media have some superb investigative journalists, yet why is it that none of them has lifted the lid on intensive farming? It is time for a rigorous investigation of this secretive industry.

Gerry Boland,

Animals in Crisis,

Keadue,

Co Roscommon.