I want to thank you, all of you, thousands of you who have supported this campaign and added your voice to it. All of you who desperately want to help the animals who are brutalised by the practices of Raystede, and many other “animal welfare” organisations.

It breaks my heart to see so many animals suffer under any circumstances, but when that suffering is caused in the name of animal welfare it is somehow so much worse.

They know we are right, that’s why they never answer us. They don’t want to see the truth because they don’t want to change, but they know it’s there. They know we are right.

So what do you do when a charity – or rather, the people running it – flagrantly disregards the organisation’s stated purpose (to prevent cruelty to animals) in order to hide from the truth?

You see, if they openly acknowledged what they privately know to be true – that breeding and killing animals for food is neither necessary nor painless – then they would have to change. Them personally. And they don’t want to do that. They enjoy the satisfaction they get from “doing their bit” for animals, it makes them feel good about themselves. And if they admitted that their personal eating habits are cruel, they wouldn’t be able to feel good about themselves anymore. They wouldn’t be able to enjoy their steak/bacon/lobster/tuna anymore. Not as much as they used to anyway.

It’s hard to believe that thinking people, people who call themselves animal lovers, would turn a blind eye to the suffering that’s so obvious to those who keep their eyes open. That’s why I concluded that there must be some corruption involved. I speculated that the trustees, fifteen or twenty years ago, must have accepted a large donation, probably from someone in the meat industry, on condition that the cafe funded by it must sell animal products. They do that you know. It’s called ‘strategic investment’. And given that Raystede’s rewritten governing documents state that conditional donations must not be accepted if the conditions conflict with the charity’s purpose, I think it’s a safe bet. But I can’t prove it. And without proof the charity commission won’t listen to me. Nor will the newspapers.

So is that it? Should the trustees of a charitable organisation which was set up by an uncompromising animal advocate who, in her lifetime did not allow meat on the premises, be allowed to ignore the principles on which it was founded? Should they be allowed to act in contravention of the charity’s own governing documents? Should they be allowed to rewrite its governing documents in an effort to evade repercussions for this serious contravention? I think not. But it seems they are. They have been getting away with it for nearly twenty years by simply ignoring our legitimate complaints. And they are making fools of the Charity Commission because they seem to think that organisation doesn’t have the integrity, the inclination or the power to intervene. And maybe they’re right.

And so what are we stuck with? These upright citizens, these paragons of virtue who chose to be Raystede trustees have eyes so willingly blind that they don’t notice the irony of displaying a Gandhi quote just a few feet away from their flesh-foods cafe. And to do this they must ignore the words of their charity’s founder who pleaded with her successors to pick up the banner and continue where she left off. She wrote:

“I decided that it was our markets and slaughterhouses, handling daily, as they do, thousands of animals up and down the country, who experience the greatest form of suffering in the greatest numbers.” Miss Raymonde-Hawkins, MBE, Mercy On Us!, 1967

Thank you for signing the petition,

for contacting Raystede and asking them to make their cafe vegan,

and for sharing this with every decent person you know.