Our response to M&S’ statement Join Viva! and Heather Mills in central London on the 15th March! Order your free Day of Action materials! Also, complain to M&S: Send our virtual postcard to M&S Phone customer services: 0845 302 1234 Write: Stuart Rose, Chief Executive, Marks & Spencer, Waterside House, 35 North Wharf Rd, London, W21 NW Write to your local paper Read our farrowing crate fact sheet Find out more about Viva!'s campaign to ban the farrowing crate Read our report "Pig in Hell" Find out what else you can do to help stop the suffering Order a Pig Action Pack, including what you can do to help Click here for information on going veggie.

This is not just TORTURE – this is M&S TORTURE

Please join Viva! And Heather Mills at our highly visible gathering outside Marks & Spencer’s flagship store in central London (Oxford St Marble Arch), from 11.30am on Thursday 15th March, where we will be urging the store to drop the cruel farrowing crate – the barbaric metal-barred crate that mothering sows are locked into for up to five weeks at a time.

This is not just TORTURE – this is M&S TORTURE … will be the message on our giant Mother’s Day card, to be signed by shoppers. On the reverse will be a message asking M&S to stop using the farrowing crate. Heather Mills will attend, wearing a portable TV screen showing distressing footage of the farrowing crate shot by Viva!. She will also hand in the giant Mother’s Day card to the store manager.

We expect major interest from the media, so if you can come down (even for a short time) it will help show that there is great public support to rid Britain of these barbaric cages. We will bring plastic pig ears and noses (if you want to wear them!), leaflets to hand to shoppers (urging them to boycott factory famed meat and go veggie) and placards reading M&S: GET PIGS OUT OF CRATES. All we need is you!

The press is called for 12 noon, but please arrive beforehand. Please note that this is at M&S Marble Arch (on Oxford St), not M&S Pantheon (also on Oxford St). For a map to M&S Marble Arch please see here.

This event is ahead of our National Day of Action on Saturday, 17 March. Read about it here.

For more information on the day email us or phone 0117 944 1000.

Why M&S?

Farrowing crates are metal cages only a little bigger than a pig’s body in which sows – female breeding pigs – are held captive for a month or more every time they give birth. They can take little more than pace or two forward and back but can never turn around, cannot mother their young and usually have no bedding, sleeping on bare concrete or metal. Such is the stress that they can experience mental collapse. More than 70 per cent of all UK sows are subjected to this torture.

Viva! is targeting M&S because it claims to have the highest animal welfare standards, claiming that all their fresh pork comes from sows that have farrowed out doors in free-range farrowing arcs. It makes no mention that many of the sows which give birth to piglets that go onto produce pig meat for other products are regularly confined in farrowing crates. Viva! believes that the farrowing crate and good animal welfare are a contradiction in terms and is calling on M&S to ban its use immediately. Waitrose has shown that it can be done. Most other supermarkets still use this confinement system. Viva!’s aim is to ban it entirely.