Save the park pigs from slaughter

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This petition had 1,915 supporters

The Issue

The owner of an "ethical" food shop in Glasgow is poised to send a pair of pigs to slaughter so that their flesh can be sold as meat.

The pigs have been living on waste ground in Queen’s Park and have become popular with locals. But, despite growing calls for the pigs to be spared, Reuben Chesters of the Locavore store appears intent on seeing the 8-month old animals “stunned, hung upside down and drained of blood through the throat.”

Time is running out for the park pigs. Urgently email Mr Chesters and appeal for him to show mercy and save the pigs from slaughter.

Email "Please don't slaughter the pigs" to shop@glasgowlocavore.org

Phone 0141 328 3303

Post a message on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/GlasgowLocavore/timeline

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Vegan FuturePetition StarterVegan Future raises awareness about the cruelty of the meat, egg and dairy industries and promotes the health and environmental benefits of veganism.
Media enquiries

The Decision Makers

Reuben Chesters
Reuben Chesters
Locavore Glasgow
Responded
“Dear All, Thanks fort taking the time to petition against the slaughter of our pigs. Many of you have responded from around the world and I imagine you have varying degrees of knowledge about me, Locavore and our project with the pigs. Below I copied to you the email I sent out as a statement I sent out on Saturday morning. Hopefully this will give you some context on our slaughter of the pigs and allow you to see our position in a more sympathetic light. Many thanks, Reuben ........ Dear All, This morning we led the pigs out of their home at The Croft and into a trailer to begin their journey to the abattoir, the butchers and then back to our shop and customers kitchens. It's been emotional for those of us involved, we've reared and cared for these animals, feeding them daily, discovering their personalities and giving them a scratch behind the ear. I imagine everyone who has spent time around them including our staff, volunteers, urban crofters and everyone else in the local community who has visited them will be sad that they are gone. Although I'm sad about seeing them go and it wasn't easy I feel that this was the right thing to do. I feel we have treated these animals very well while they have been with us, we've fed them good food, given them a very nice place to live, and reared them in a way which is good for them and the environment. As controversial and provoking as this project has been we feel it is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing as a social enterprise which is working to help build a more just and sustainable local food system. For those of you less familiar with Locavore let me give you some background to put this project in context. As a social enterprise and not-for-private-profit Community Interest Company we exist to take forward projects and initiatives which help build local food networks which are better for the environment, the local economy and local communities – all our profits must go back into this mission. In the grandest sense it's about pulling back the globalised food system from multinational companies who are driven by share values, not real values. We think that food should be a vehicle for delivering social good, not an opportunity to extract wealth from the many to the few. Over the past two or three years we have been around we've made small but locally significant steps towards building a better food system at a local level. We opened a tiny shop and expanded to a still small but much bigger shop within a year. We started a veg bag deliver scheme which now provides good value organic Scottish produce to 150 households a week in Glasgow and surrounds. We've delivered cookery and gardening workshops to many groups across the city. We built enough demand through our shop and veg bags to take on a 2.5 acre market garden in Neilston which is producing very local vegetables in line with organic methods. We have started work on an Urban Croft which already has provided self-employment opportunities for 5 local people as well as hosting our pigs and goats. Through all this we support full and part time employment for 8 people as well as many volunteering, training and self-employment opportunities. We've done this with very little funding. So why pigs in the park? As a social enterprise all about making sustainable local food work we need to address meat. Meat production at its current scale using commercial methods has a massive impact on the global environment, not to mention health and animal welfare issues. Depending on what numbers you quote, meat is responsible for 14-22% of all man made green house gas emissions, this in the context of foods total of around 30%. For us not to tackle meat would be grossly negligent of our aims. With that in mind; our view is not that meat is unsustainable by definition, but rather that current consumption levels in this country need to be addressed and that the methods in which meat is produced need to be improved. We're not saying meat is wrong or right (everyone has to decide their own ethics), but in Scotland where much of our agricultural land is marginal with little use other than grazing with animals to produce food then this is logical way to produce food that can be sustainable while providing high welfare conditions for animals and livelihoods for farmers. Unfortunately the trend seems to be moving towards intensive indoor 'mega-farms'. Through the project we've hoped to highlight issues such as the British pork industry's reliance on imported soya bean as a feedstock. This means the industry can feed more pigs by importing feed from abroad. The footprint of the area needed to grown the UK's soya demand is the size of Yorkshire. Most of the UK's soy is imported from South America where the growing demand has caused mass wildlife habitat and carbon sink destruction. In particular Brazil’s Cerado, see http://bit.ly/1tb204p, is being affected. One partial solution to…”

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Petition created on 20 November 2014