Feltwell and Methwold, Norfolk – Animal protection group PETA has launched a campaign urging the Borough Council of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk to reject plans for the development of two proposed intensive farms in the area. If plans are approved, the two mega-farms will condemn around 48,000 pigs and 6.7 million chickens a year to a miserable life and terrifying death.

“From the increase in traffic to the knowledge that millions of sensitive pigs and chickens would be suffering inside filthy sheds nearby, the proposed facilities would be a blight on Norfolk’s neighbourhoods – as well as its reputation,” says PETA Vice President Elisa Allen. “If council officials visited one of these intensive farms and saw the terrified animals and smelled the putrid stench of ammonia and faeces, the council would surely refuse to grant permission for these hellholes.”

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” – stresses that animals on farms are crammed into squalid, severely crowded sheds and deprived of everything that is natural and important to them. At the abattoir, many are killed painfully, sometimes without being properly stunned. In addition to tarnishing the community’s reputation, these large-scale operations could have adverse effects on the surrounding countryside – they would likely pollute local water sources, and the high levels of noise and traffic they would generate would undoubtedly disturb local residents. On a global scale, factory farming is among the leading contributors to the greenhouse gas emissions causing the climate catastrophe.

PETA further notes that cramming stressed animals together on faeces-ridden farms, transporting them in packed lorries, and slaughtering them on killing floors soaked with blood, urine, and other bodily fluids encourages deadly pathogens to emerge that can mutate and spread from animals to humans. The devastating COVID-19 pandemic arose from confining and killing animals for food.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, or Instagram.