“When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can...” -Tolstoy
This is what they do. Every other week, in all weathers, a small group of people drive to the edge of a village in South Gloucestershire and stand at the gate of a slaughterhouse.
They come closer.
From a distance, the Westerleigh site looks unremarkable. Corrugated steel painted light green. A perimeter fence. The kind of architecture designed to be passed without a second look and mostly, it is. The lorries make their circuit. Goods move. The economy rumbles along. Nothing distinguishes it from any other industrial unit on the edge of any other English village. A depot. A distribution centre. Something to do with logistics.
Then a truck slows at the gate, the angle changes, and you see through the slats. The press of bodies. The flicker of an ear. Steam rising off skin in cold air. And then, if you are still enough and close enough, an eye looking back at you.
There is no reason, in that moment, that it should be you on the outside rather than the eye behind the slat. But it is, so you witness.
The vigil-keepers here are not performing anguish. They are doing something almost counter-instinctual: refusing the urge to look away, staying in the discomfort, letting it cost them something. And then acting on what they saw.
We’re asking you to do that today. We know we’ve asked a lot lately, we have many campaigns running at once, and that’s because your support means we can take on this industry at scale. We won’t waste that. We hope you’ll stand with us again.
Object to this expansion on our website, it only takes a few minutes.
I will oppose slaughterhouse expansion.
Inside Westerleigh, 19,000 pigs are killed every week. The slaughter method, high-concentration carbon dioxide, has been found by the UK Government’s own Animal Welfare Committee to cause pain, respiratory distress, fear, and panic before loss of consciousness. They recommended it be phased out within five years. It hasn’t been.
Now Pilgrim’s UK, part of a multinational conglomerate with over £4.2 billion in UK annual turnover, has applied to South Gloucestershire Council to expand the site from 19,000 to 25,000 pigs per week, bringing the annual total to 1.3 million animals.
The community have a number of concerns. Jody Wilkins, a healthcare worker who has attended the Westerleigh vigils for 18 months, puts it plainly: “No community should be forced to live with the odour, noise, pollution, and environmental damage that these facilities impose.” A local GP who lives nearby agrees. Plagued by the smell for at least fifteen years, she notes that the parish council, a neighbouring town council, and their local MP are all now engaged in fighting this. Thirty-five formal odour complaints in less than a year and a half . The local word for further expansion is “unthinkable” and they’ve been patient long enough to have earned that word.
Jo Lazarus, CAFF’s campaign coordinator, is clear about what’s at stake: “Factory farming causes immense animal suffering and has devastating consequences for our environment, water and air quality, as well as for the communities forced to live alongside it. Local residents deserve protection. We stand with the Westerleigh community in opposing this expansion.”
I will stand with Westerleigh.
Back at the gate, the trucks keep coming. The vigil-keepers know the engines by sound now. They stand in the exhaust and the cold and the smell, and they look, and someone looks back.
Most of us will never stand there. But speaking up is how we stand with the people who do.
In Solidarity,
Animal Rising and Communities Against Factory Farming
CAFF works with residents across the UK to legally challenge harmful intensive farming developments. None of it happens without the people who show up. If this moved you, please share it.
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