Medialife Viva!’s Media Blitz… for the animals Killing for kicks
It was over a decade ago that Viva! first shocked British people with our exposé (News of the World) of the never ending slaughter of Australia’s kangaroos for meat and leather – the largest massacre of land animals on the planet. As a result, we emptied the shelves of kangaroo meat in every supermarket in the UK. We continued the pressure and David
Beckham gave up his Adidas kangaroo skin Predator football boots and Nike told us they would move away from using kangaroo skin. As all the most expensive football boots are now made from synthetics, we have had a huge impact and there are no longer any excuses available to the multinational sports companies that say nothing is as good as ‘K-leather’. What has disturbed them is our shocking revelation that after their mothers have been
shot, up to 800,000 baby kangaroos – joeys – are killed by being decapitated or clubbed to death. Not the best sales pitch in the world, particularly as it happens year after year. We heard a few weeks ago that the kangaroo killing industry was outraged because their leather sales were collapsing due to our actions and so we decided to give another push to finally end this obscene trade. A magnificent dps in the Daily Star
pulled no punches, naming and shaming those footballers who still insist on wearing kangaroo. And Lucy Siegle at the Observerdevoted most of her page to the same subject.
Not the milk of human kindness
It took weeks of undercover work to achieve it because – surprise, surprise – dairy farmers are very nervous about showing some of the realities of their trade. In the end we managed to film what happens on most dairy farms – the shooting of male calves at just a day or two old. Our purpose in undergoing this ordeal was so that we could take the
reality of milk production to an unknowing national audience who have been conned into believing that milk comes from ecstatically- happy, daisy-chewing old lady cows called Gerty and Violet. There’s never a mention of their calves being taken away from them nor the slaughter of their little bull calves. The farms we filmed on were all
suppliers of milk to the now US- owned Cadbury, the UK’s largest producer of milk chocolate, so it was they who were forced to defend the brutal actions of their suppliers. With the help of a brilliant dps in
the Sun, a detailed story with pictures in the Mailonline and extracts shown on BBC1, you could hear the embarrassment dripping from every one of their lame excuses.
26 viva!life
The point of publicity
We couldn’t remain silent when a London-based, publicity-hungry fashion designer thought it was acceptable to make a dress and bra out of yak and cow nipples – 3,000 of them. We stormed into action: “Isn’t the way we treat farmed animals bad enough without turning their dead bodies into a runway freak show?” we said – and much more besides. Our words were carried by the Sunday Peopleand
Daily Mailbut they also went global – to India, the US and Canada amongst others. Animals have become a sensitive subject area and anything as obscene as this is almost guaranteed publicity. If we don’t provide a counterview, such sick, cynical exercises in self- promotion go unchallenged.
by Tony Wardle, Editorial Director
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