Animal Rising is publishing previously unseen footage filmed inside British factory farms, as part of a legal challenge against the UK Government on the animal factories issue. The British animal rights organisation is building a campaign around the claim that intensive animal agriculture in the UK breaches existing animal welfare law, and is using the release to press the government for a firm commitment to end factory farming by 2040, alongside a fully funded roadmap for a transition to a more sustainable food system.
Animal Rising is framing its central argument around legality rather than welfare alone, arguing that the evidence it has gathered points to a system in what it describes as “fundamental conflict” with the laws written to protect Farmed Animals.
A petition accompanying the campaign calls on the government to halt further expansion of intensive farming immediately, invest in plant-based food production, support farmers through the transition to plant-based agriculture, and restore land taken out of intensive use. Animal Rising states that the roadmap should be structured to protect farming livelihoods, rather than strand them.
The group has spent much of 2026 opposing individual megafarm and hatchery applications, including a chicken unit proposal in Wragby, Lincolnshire, or an intensive cows’ flesh complex on the edge of Potterne, near Devizes, in Wiltshire. Animal Rising’s grassroots group Communities Against Factory Farming has been joining forces with residents, denouncing factory farming proposals as inherently abusive to the animals and bad for the environment and the health of the community.
Animal Rising has also submitted a formal response to a draft government planning framework that would give economic weight to the intensification of Farmed Animal production, a proposal it argues would entrench industrial units and reduce local authorities’ ability to refuse them.
