Media Release

July 11, 2003 Meat Heiress To Launch Video Attacking Meat Production Video launch and interviews: Boothroyd Room, Portcullis House, Wednesday, July 16 at 3pm. Presentations finish at 3.30pm. Photo Opportunity: 2.40pm, College Green. (No photography permitted in Portcullis House.) Contact Alistair Currie: 0117 944 1000; 0780 165 4011 on the day. Julia Stephenson, heiress to the Vestey/Dewhurst meat empire, will be available for photographs and questions about her recent midnight visit to an intensive pig farm. She will be launching a new, undercover video by animal group Viva! to MPs. The presentation will be hosted by Norman Baker MP. Former MAFF veterinary surgeon Christopher Day MRCVS and Viva! campaigner Alistair Currie will also speak. The video shows injured, dead and distressed animals in squalid conditions on UK pig farms. It also reveals how breeding sows are imprisoned for long periods in metal cages called farrowing crates, which are little bigger than their own bodies. The Mother Cage (12 mins), enclosed, was secretly filmed on 12 farms over the last year, at least one of which boasts membership of the Assured British Meat quality assurance scheme. Footage shows dilapidated buildings and filthy conditions; pigs with skin lesions, hernias, respiratory distress and ulcerated prolapses; sows showing signs of chronic mental distress; dead, dying and decomposing piglets; unburied carcasses; and a pig confined to a crate just 17in. wide, restricting all movement. Julia Stephenson says: "I was utterly shocked by what I saw on the farm I visited and the British public will be too when they see these images: they just don't know what goes on. The fact that I had to enter surreptitiously at night shows just how secretive the whole industry is. My family's fortune comes from this business but I have no hesitation in urging people to stop eating factory farmed animals and go vegetarian". Viva! campaigner, Alistair Currie, says: "These breeding units make a mockery of claims that Britain has high standards of farmed animal welfare. Throughout his period as minister for animal welfare, Elliot Morley defended the farrowing crate and even factory farming. We hope that new minister Ben Bradshaw will approach this question with an open mind and acknowledge that this system is unjustifiable".