Ecotricity, the only energy company in the world certified as vegan by both the Vegan Society and the vegan charity Viva!, is now doing undercover investigations to expose animal cruelty, and has discovered how animals are used to produce energy in other companies.
In January 2022 they first exposed how the bodies of hunt dogs that had been shot by UK hunts for being surplus to requirement were used to make electricity and gas. Their undercover filming at hunt kennels in England and Wales showed appalling animal abuse. This prompted the company to launch a crowd funder to finance more investigations, and with the money raised, they began investigating farms. They then discovered that animals on farms are also used to produce energy.
A pig farm in Norfolk had a mystery illness in a small number of pigs which made the farmer decide to kill them all. An undercover operation revealed how the farmer kill them. The footage shows 15 pigs herded into a straw-baled area and shot at. At least half of the pigs can be seen writhing and convulsing, and a single shot is not enough to kill many of them. Others are shot several times, as they scramble frantically inside the enclosure. The same lorry that was seen removing the dead bodies from the farm was spotted a day later leaving an animal by-products processing factory, JG Pears, where animals are rendered down into Meat and Bone Meal (MBM powder) and then burnt in biomass to make electricity.
Dale Vince, Ecotricity founder, is working with Advocates for Animals, the UK’s first animal law firm, to see whether the law has been broken in this particular case. He said, “Forget the farming idyll of the meat marketing industry — farms are not safe for animals. Again and again, we see evidence of the most awful treatment of animals on farms. Some of it is allowed by the rules (incredibly), some of it is not. This brutal murder of pigs by shotgun is something else. Animals are a food choice we don’t need to make — animal farming is driving the climate crisis, multiple human health crises and global wildlife extinction. It makes no sense. It certainly makes no economic sense — we get far less food from animals than we feed to them. It’s a barbaric, senseless, abusive industry — that’s literally killing us and the planet we live on. It’s time we moved on as a species.”
