BBC News tonight - Defra lies exposed

[Alison Banville]

BBC London News tonight reported that two slaughterhouse workers filmed committing sickening acts of cruelty have been jailed. What's very interesting is the role of Defra which refused to prosecute any of the employees at the 8 abattoirs out of 9 filmed by Animal Aid in which the already inadequate laws were broken. Defra had falsely claimed that the footage would be inadmissable in court - a blatant lie!! It's only when responsibility was taken from them and given to the CPS that a case was brought, and then only against one company. Animal Aid are pushing for more prosecutions using their evidence. http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/CAMPAIGNS/slaughter/ALL/// Filming was also done in slaughterhouses certified organic to explode the myth of humane meat. 
 
Why, may one ask, is Defra so reluctant to do the right thing? Their stance is grindingly familiar to me after following undercover farming stories over the last two decades. It's simple, they protect the industry at all costs, even at the cost of incredible suffering about which they care absolutely nothing. Humanity and compassion are rare enough when it comes to human need V corporate interests, but where animals are concerned - the ultimate innocents - it is non-existent. However, Defra can rely on a public that really would rather not know what goes in these hell-holes. 
 
Let's not forget, too, that the everyday and legal treatment of animals in these places would see the owner of a dog or cat treated that way up in court for cruelty - terrified animals dragged and pushed to their deaths is necessarily cruel, and as the father of one of the convicted men revealingly said: 'they issued my boy with that baton to keep 'em moving', and a parade of ex-slaughterhouse workers confirm that the kind of abuse caught by this undercover operation is routine. Of course it is, only a fool thinks otherwise. As Gary Yourofsky says: 'how do you think slaves are treated?' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es6U00LMmC4  
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