That should surprise nobody.

Using animals is labour-intensive because animals resist being turned into products. They have bodies. They have needs. They move. They reproduce. They get ill. They have to be confined, fed, transported, inseminated, milked, separated, restrained, killed, cut up, packaged, and sold.

That takes labour.

Not useful labour. Not necessary labour. Labour organised around domination.

A new modelling study published in The Lancet Planetary Health looked at what would happen to agricultural labour under different food system scenarios. The researchers examined 20 food groups across 179 countries, comparing business-as-usual food demand in 2030 with shifts towards flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian, and vegan dietary patterns.

The results are huge.

Under business as usual, food production in 2030 would require around 383 million full-time-equivalent agricultural workers. Of that, 215 million would be needed to produce crops, which make up 82% of food by weight. Another 164 million would be needed to produce animal products, which make up just 13% of food by weight.

Animal products account for a small share of food by weight, but demand a massive share of agricultural labour.

The study found that, per 1,000 tonnes of product, animal products required around four times more labour than crops on average in 2020. This is not some mystery of economics. It is what happens when an entire food system is built around turning living beings into commodities.

A field of plants does not need to be impregnated.

A lentil does not need to have their baby taken.

A chickpea does not need to be stunned, shackled, bled out, or dismembered.

When people talk about “farming jobs” in animal agriculture, they often flatten everything into a sentimental image of rural life. A farmer leaning on a gate. A family business. A tradition. A landscape. A way of life.

What they are usually defending is paid participation in an industry built on making someone else’s body profitable.

The study found that shifting towards more plant-based dietary patterns could reduce global agricultural labour requirements by 5% under flexitarian and pescatarian scenarios, and by 22 to 28% under vegetarian and vegan dietary scenarios. That is roughly 83 to 106 million fewer full-time-equivalent workers needed under the latter models.

Cue the predictable outrage.

“What about farmers?”

Fine. What about them?

Workers should not be abandoned. Rural communities should not be thrown away. People whose livelihoods are tied to animal agriculture need serious transition support, retraining, public investment, income protection, and alternative work. That is not optional. That is what a just transition means.

But “people currently earn money from this” is not a moral argument for continuing it.

People earn money from people trafficking. People earn money from slavery. People earned money from industries we later recognised as destructive, dishonest, or indefensible. The point was never to punish workers. The point was to stop pretending the industry itself deserved protection.

Animal agriculture is no different.

If a job depends on breeding animals into existence as resources, using their bodies, taking what they produce, and killing them when the numbers say so, the answer is not to preserve that job forever. The answer is to support the person out of that role and end the system that made the role necessary.

That is the difference between defending workers and defending exploitation.

The research does not say plant-based food systems would destroy agriculture. It says labour would shift. Crop labour would rise by 8 to 25%, especially for fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and vegetable oils. Some countries would need more agricultural workers, particularly those expanding horticulture. Others, especially countries dominated by livestock production, would need far fewer.

In other words, this is not the end of farming. It is the end of pretending that farming has to mean using animals.

The study also points to possible transition pathways. Workers could move from livestock production into horticulture, food services, transport, retail, manufacturing, construction, or nature conservation. Land no longer required for animal agriculture could be restored, and some of the people previously employed in animal production could be paid to help repair the landscapes the industry helped degrade.

That matters because the current system does not just use animals. It also traps human labour inside an industry with no future. It asks workers to keep doing physically demanding, emotionally corrosive, low-status, often precarious work so the public can keep buying products they do not need.

And then, whenever anyone suggests changing the system, the industry hides behind those workers.

It is always the same trick.

They do not care about workers when conditions are poor. They do not care about slaughterhouse staff when the work traumatises them. They do not care about migrant labourers when they are underpaid or exploited. They do not care about farmers crushed by debt, supermarkets, feed costs, disease outbreaks, or corporate control.

But the second someone challenges animal agriculture, suddenly the whole industry becomes a workers’ rights campaign.

No.

If we care about workers, we should want them out of industries built on death, domination, and ecological collapse. We should want public money used to build new systems, not prop up old ones. We should want subsidies redirected away from animal exploitation and into food security, plant-based production, rewilding, restoration, and rural renewal.

The study estimated that dietary shifts could reduce global labour costs by $790 to $995 billion under vegetarian and vegan dietary scenarios. That is not just an economic detail. That is a glimpse of how much human effort is currently being absorbed by an inefficient, destructive system that exists because culture keeps mistaking habit for necessity.

A plant-based food system would not solve everything by itself. It would still need workers’ rights. It would still need fair wages. It would still need land justice, migrant protections, public investment, and safeguards against corporate capture.

But it would remove one enormous injustice from the centre of the food system.

The animals.

Because the problem with animal agriculture is not only that it uses too much land, water, feed, labour, and public money.

The problem is that it uses animals. Everything else is a consequence of that decision.

A just transition cannot mean finding a softer way to keep animals as property. It has to mean moving workers, land, money, and political imagination away from exploitation entirely.

The future of farming does not need to be built on cages, slaughterhouses, milking parlours, hatcheries, fishing vessels, and feedlots.

It can be built on food.

Actual food.

Not someone’s body.

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The idea that people who spent generations chasing foxes suddenly got together after the Hunting Act and developed a deep spiritual passion for following pretend smells across the countryside was always insulting.

Now the UK government is consulting on a proposed ban on trail hunting in England and Wales. Good. About time.

But if this becomes another polite reform full of loopholes, exemptions, licensing schemes, transition periods and trust-based nonsense, hunts will do what they have done for the last 20 years. They will adapt the costume. They will keep the hunt.

Hunting wild mammals with dogs was banned in 2004. Since then, hunts have claimed they are no longer chasing foxes, hares or other wild animals. They are simply following a pre-laid trail.

What a coincidence, then, that the hounds so often seem to end up pursuing living animals.

What a coincidence that hunt monitors, local residents, passers-by and activists have recorded thousands of hours of footage suggesting trail hunting is used as a smokescreen for unlawful hunting.

What a coincidence that the countryside keeps filling with people on horses, packs of hounds, terrier men, blocked roads, trespass, intimidation, badger sett interference and dead animals.

At some point, “accident” becomes model.

The public is not on the side of hunting. A League Against Cruel Sports poll found that 62% of people support a trail hunting ban. More than 80% of Britons oppose fox hunting. Just 12% want it legalised.

Hunts love pretending they are the countryside. They are not.

There is no single rural community. There are rural people who oppose hunting. There are rural people whose land is invaded, whose companion animals are chased or killed, whose roads are blocked, whose lives are disrupted by people who think tradition is a licence to do whatever they want.

Hunting does not represent rural life. It imposes itself on rural life, then hides behind it.

The proposed ban must not focus only on the fiction of the “trail”. That is the wrong starting point. The law should not be built around what hunts claim they are doing. It should be built around what their actions predictably cause.

If a pack of hounds is taken into places where wild mammals live, such as coverts, hedgerows, setts and resting places, it is foreseeable that those hounds may locate, pursue or hunt a wild animal. That should be enough.

The requirement to prove intent has helped create the theatre of plausible deniability. Hunts do not need to openly announce their intentions if the whole structure allows everyone involved to shrug and call it an accident afterwards.

The law should use a foreseeability or recklessness test. Would a reasonable person recognise that these actions could result in a wild mammal being hunted with dogs?

If yes, that should be an offence.

This also means liability cannot stop with the person nearest the hounds. Hunting is a joint enterprise. It relies on organisers, masters, directors, landowners, dog handlers, drivers, funders, equipment providers and supporters. Everyone gets a role. Everyone gets distance. Everyone gets to pretend responsibility belongs somewhere else.

That must end.

Landowners who knowingly allow hunts onto their land should be liable. Those who provide dogs, transport, equipment, access or logistical support should be liable. Those who witness unlawful hunting and fail to take reasonable steps to stop it, report it or withdraw support should not be able to just stand there. A “failure to prevent” offence should be introduced.

A “going equipped” offence should be introduced too. If someone turns up with the dogs, tools or equipment associated with locating, pursuing, digging out or killing wild mammals, they should not be able to escape responsibility because no animal happened to be caught that day.

We already understand this principle elsewhere. You do not need to wait for the full damage before recognising the machinery of the offence.

The same logic applies to drag hunting and clean boot hunting. If these activities put packs of hounds into environments where wild mammals are present, they create the same foreseeable risk. A fox does not care whether the humans call it trail hunting, drag hunting or clean boot hunting. Once hounds are in pursuit, the branding collapses.

Hunts have had 20 years to prove they can be trusted with ambiguity. They have proved the opposite.

Protect the Wild found more than 300 incidents of hunt cruelty, chaos and criminality before the 2024 hunting season had even begun. In the previous season, nearly 600 wild animals were reportedly chased or killed. There were at least six illegal attempts to dig foxes from the ground and 124 incidents involving interference with badger setts.

This is not culture war nonsense.

This is organised animal exploitation protected by loopholes, status and political cowardice.

Animal-based scents and artificial scents that mimic animal scents should also be banned. There is no good reason to preserve the tools that allow hunts to train hounds around the pursuit of wild animals, then act shocked when hounds do exactly what they have been bred and trained to do.

The same applies to transition periods. No.

Wild animals do not need a managed phase-out of being hunted. Hunts do not need extra time to reorganise their excuses.

And the “what about the hounds?” argument deserves no patience from people who routinely kill hounds when they are no longer useful. Existing hounds should be retired, rehomed or moved into suitable sanctuary environments with proper oversight. They should not be used as hostages to keep hunting alive.

This consultation is a chance to do more than ban a word.

A real ban must cover hunting with hounds in practice. It must focus on foreseeable outcomes, not claimed intent. It must criminalise facilitation. It must hold the hunt as a whole responsible. It must close the trail hunting loophole without opening new ones under different names.

Wild animals are not resources.

They are not moving targets for rural cosplay.

They are not legal puzzles for hunts to manoeuvre around.

The government is asking for feedback until the 18th of June 2026.

Give it to them.

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During the April Fair on the 20th of April, Morante was facing the fourth bull of the afternoon, an animal named Clandestino, when things stopped going to plan. Reports say the bull charged him, knocked him down, and drove a horn into his backside as he lay on the sand. Doctors later confirmed a wound of around 10cm, damage to the anal sphincter muscles, and a 1.5cm perforation in the rectal wall. He underwent emergency surgery lasting around two hours.

It is difficult to imagine a better summary of bullfighting than that. A man dressed up as a cultural icon enters an arena to dominate, exhaust, and kill an animal for entertainment, then ends the day being rushed to hospital because the victim fought back. The “king of the bullfighters” was reduced to clutching his torn trousers while being carried out of the ring by other matadors.

Morante later said it was the most painful goring he had ever suffered. He reportedly could not eat or sleep properly afterwards and required a catheter while recovering in hospital. There is an obvious joke here about finally understanding what it means to be on the receiving end of something sharp and unwanted, but the real point is simpler. Bullfighting is not noble, artistic, or brave. It is a blood spectacle built around ritualised animal abuse, dressed up in embroidery and ego.

Around 1,500 bullfights are still held in Spain every year, though support has declined as more people recognise the obvious. Bulls are living beings deliberately stressed, injured, and killed for an audience that has confused cruelty with tradition.

So yes, Morante’s comeback has attracted headlines. But only because one of the bulls decided that if somebody was going to get ripped open in Seville, it did not have to be the usual victim.

Bullfighting belongs in the past, alongside Morante’s dignity.

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That is the point at the heart of Serrin Rutledge-Prior’s 2026 paper on cruelty prosecutions in Australia, and it should rattle anyone who still thinks animal law is mainly a matter of “better enforcement.” The problem is deeper than that. The law does not merely fail animals here and there. The legal system struggles to recognise who the victim is.

Rutledge-Prior looked at 552 cruelty prosecutions involving “pet” animals across Australia between 2011 and 2025. Even with this supposedly more protected group, the pattern was ugly. Animals were repeatedly treated as background objects in cases that were, in theory, about violence done to them. They were there, but not really. Present, but flattened. Visible only through the interests of the humans around them.

That is what makes this paper so important. It is not just about cruelty. It is about institutional erasure.

The law likes to posture as neutral, principled, civilised. But when it comes to other animals, it still speaks the language of ownership. And once someone is legally framed as property, justice becomes distorted from the start.

You can see this in the cases Rutledge-Prior highlights. Humans convicted of severe neglect were still allowed to keep some animals. A woman who neglected 156 animals, including chickens trampling each other to death in cramped cages, was still allowed to keep her dog. Another magistrate avoided recording a conviction against a woman who severely neglected horses because a full ban would affect her livelihood. Think about what that means. The court explicitly weighed a human’s economic convenience against the basic interests of the animals she had already failed.

Try imagining that logic applied consistently elsewhere. A childcare provider gravely neglects children, but the court worries that stopping her from caring for children might harm her income. It sounds absurd because it is absurd. Yet when the victims are animals, the system says it with a straight face. That is because the legal system still treats them first as property and only second, if at all, as beings.

The paper identifies another pattern that should enrage people. When large numbers of animals are harmed, the law often stops counting them as individuals. Seventy-nine cats can become one cruelty charge. Fifty birds can become three charges. More animals does not necessarily mean more recognition. In fact, the opposite often seems to happen. The larger the number, the easier it becomes for the system to blur them into a single mass.

This is exactly how speciesism works. Individuality disappears once animals are reduced to a category, a stockpile, a hoard, a flock, a breeding group, a problem. The victim stops being someone and becomes an undifferentiated scene.

A human court would never pretend that harming dozens of people amounted to a single victim in any morally serious sense. But for animals, the law regularly performs this vanishing act. Their bodies count as evidence. Their individuality does not. Then there is the most revealing point of all: the law does not even consistently treat death as a more serious harm than non-lethal cruelty.

Rutledge-Prior shows examples where someone who killed animals received a lighter penalty than someone whose victim survived. In one case, two dogs were shot dead and the penalty was lower than in another case where a dog survived poisoning. In another, a dog who died from being left chained without shade on a hot day resulted in a lower penalty than a dog who was beaten but survived.

For humans, the law recognises suffering and death as harms to the victim. For animals, pain may be acknowledged, but death still slips into the old property logic. Damage has occurred, yes, but not in the full moral sense reserved for persons. The animal’s life is not consistently treated as something that belonged to them.

That is why this paper matters beyond the courtroom. It exposes a wider lie in liberal democracies that talk endlessly about dignity, individuality, and equal concern while excluding animals from the moral community those words are supposed to protect.

Rutledge-Prior argues that animal cruelty should be understood not just as an invisible crime, but as a crime against invisible victims. That distinction matters. Animals are not only hidden because cruelty happens behind closed doors or because institutions keep poor records. They are already invisible before the abuse begins, because the law does not start from the premise that they are subjects with claims of their own.

Animals should be recognised as crime victims. Not symbolically. Not sentimentally. Formally. That means dignity. Representation. Protection from abusers. Charging and sentencing that reflect the number of individuals harmed. A legal framework that stops treating violence to animals as a vague offence against public decency and starts treating it as what it is: violence against someone.

None of this requires faith in harsher punishments. Rutledge-Prior is right to caution against that. More cages will not fix a system already built on domination. But prevention, transparency, legal representation, and actual recognition of animals as victims would at least begin to disrupt the machinery of erasure.

If the law can only see animals as property, then it cannot give them justice. And that should force a more uncomfortable question.

What does it say about a society when even its most “protected” animals can be abused and still not be fully recognised as the victims?

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Every day England delays, it protects an industry built on turning dogs into gambling equipment and pretending that what happens to them is culture.

Labour’s defence of that industry is becoming harder to justify and uglier to listen to. When culture secretary Lisa Nandy said the gambling industry “brings joy to a lot of people” and that the industry as a whole brings “positive benefits to the United Kingdom”, she was not speaking for the dogs whose bodies are used up for entertainment. She was speaking for an economy that treats broken animals as acceptable collateral.

And when Labour insiders reportedly suggest that England cannot follow Scotland and Wales because greyhound racing is tied to working-class culture in so-called red wall areas, the insult deepens. The rebuttal has come from Green MP Hannah Spencer, who accused Labour of “offensively caricaturing” working-class people. She said Nandy “continuously offends people by saying that working-class people don’t care about dogs or each other”, adding that the idea is “a caricature” and “very offensive”.

She is right.

This line from Labour is not solidarity with working-class communities. It is class prejudice dressed up as political realism. It assumes ordinary people are so morally stunted, so emotionally shallow, that they need the exploitation of dogs preserved on their behalf. It suggests that concern for animals is somehow middle-class, while gambling firms extracting money from struggling communities is authentic working-class culture. That is contempt, not respect.

And it is especially grotesque because the facts are not hidden.

Between 2018 and 2023, 2,700 greyhounds died and more than 26,500 injuries were recorded. Animal Aid says more than 4,000 dogs were killed or euthanised in the greyhound racing industry between 2017 and 2024. The League Against Cruel Sports says 3,809 dogs were injured in 2024 alone, with at least 123 dying by the track. In Scotland, 13 dogs tested positive for cocaine in a single year. This is what Labour is refusing to confront.

Greyhounds are bred for speed, pushed around tracks at up to 40mph, and discarded when they stop making money. Broken legs, spinal injuries, head trauma, paralysis, drugging, abandonment, death. The defenders of this trade want the public to believe these outcomes are signs of poor oversight. They are not. They are what happens when living beings are turned into units of profit.

Once a dog’s body becomes an asset, the dog ceases to matter except as long as she can perform.

That is why the usual talk of welfare is so hollow. The problem is not that the machinery occasionally malfunctions. The problem is that dogs are being fed into the machinery at all. Profit demands speed. Speed creates impact. Impact creates injuries. Injuries create deaths. The cruelty is not sitting at the edges of greyhound racing. It is built into its purpose.

Scotland and Wales have started to admit that. England is still making excuses.

Those excuses look even thinner when you consider who benefits from the delay. Spencer pointed to Labour’s closeness to the gambling industry, saying Labour MPs “will frequently accept really expensive hospitality packages from gambling companies”. It is difficult to take moral handwringing about jobs and culture seriously when the industry in question is so heavily entangled with lobbying power and political access.

Predictably, the Greyhound Board of Great Britain falls back on the usual language of heritage and economics. It says greyhound racing is “enshrined in British culture”, contributes £164 million a year to the economy, and employs 5,400 people. But none of that answers the moral question.

British culture once enshrined all sorts of things. That is not a defence. Economic contribution is not a defence either. Almost every entrenched injustice has people making money from it. That is usually the reason it survives so long.

The real shift here is not governmental courage. It is public tolerance collapsing. Scotland’s last track has already closed. Wales has only one remaining track. The industry is shrinking because fewer people are willing to keep pretending that running dogs to injury and death for betting slips is harmless fun.

England now stands exposed.

The question is no longer whether greyhound racing can be cleaned up, regulated better, or made kinder. It cannot. Hannah Spencer is right to call out Labour’s class caricatures, because that rhetoric is doing a second job alongside defending the industry. It is trying to shame people out of their conscience.

It will not work forever.

Greyhounds are not betting infrastructure. They are not here to generate revenue until their bodies fail.

Scotland and Wales have started acting like that is true.

England should stop hiding behind gamblers, lobbyists, and patronising nonsense about the working class, and ban greyhound racing too.

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Most people eat what feels normal. What feels familiar. What feels socially safe. They look sideways before they look inward. They take their cues from family, friends, trends, restaurant menus, online comments, and whatever the culture has already dressed up as ordinary. That matters, because if meat consumption is socially manufactured, it can also be socially dismantled.

A recent study by Toritseju Begho and Shuainan Liu, published in the International Journal of Food Science and Technology, offers a useful glimpse into that machinery. Through four experiments involving 483 adults in China, the researchers tested how people responded to plant-based meat when it was framed as popular, positively discussed, attractively reviewed, or positioned as the default option.

The findings are revealing. Not because they show people carefully weighing evidence and making principled decisions. They do not. They show something much more familiar: people follow the crowd, absorb the mood around them, and respond strongly to what appears accepted.

That should not surprise anyone. Meat has never been just food. It has always been social permission made edible.

The power of “everyone else is doing it”

In the first experiment, participants were split into two groups. One was told that three out of ten Chinese consumers would choose plant-based meat. The other was told that seven out of ten would choose it. That was enough to create a sharp difference. Only 41% of people in the first group said they would buy it, compared with 68% in the second.

Nothing about the product changed. No one suddenly discovered a new nutritional fact. No one tasted anything. The only thing that shifted was the perceived social norm.

That is the point.

People often defend meat consumption as if it were the product of deep personal conviction, but much of it is imitation with a knife and fork. When a food looks fringe, people hesitate. When it looks normal, they relax. The moral seriousness of using animals rarely enters the equation at all. What enters is comfort. Belonging. The fear of being the odd one out.

This matters beyond plant-based meat. It tells us that public behaviour is not fixed because people have reached some settled ethical truth. It is fixed because norms repeat themselves until they feel like nature.

Social media does not just reflect opinion. It manufactures it.

The second study moved into social media territory. Participants were shown simulated comments about plant-based meat. One group saw positive comments linked to environmental, health, and animal-related concerns. The other saw negative comments. The positive comments also had stronger engagement, which is exactly how social proof tends to work online: an opinion does not just appear, it arrives already endorsed.

Again, the results were significant. People who saw positive comments were more inclined to buy plant-based meat. People who saw negative comments drifted towards hesitation.

That is how flimsy “preference” often is. It can be nudged by the tone of a comment section.

This should be obvious by now, yet people still talk about consumer choices as though they emerge in a vacuum. They do not. They are socially rehearsed. If enough people publicly perform approval, others read that approval as evidence. If enough people mock or dismiss something, hesitation multiplies.

That same mechanism has been working in favour of meat for generations. Most people do not grow up interrogating the use of animals. They grow up surrounded by approval. Family meals, adverts, packaging, school lunches, restaurant menus, jokes, habits, celebrations. The social script is already written before they can read it.

The study is useful because it shows that script can be tampered with. Not by force. Not by banning choice. By making a different choice look legitimate.

Framing changes behaviour, even when the facts barely change

The third experiment may be the most revealing of all. Participants were shown a discounted plant-based menu, but the information was framed differently. One group was told that 90% of customer feedback was positive. The other was told that 10% of customer feedback was negative.

These statements describe the same reality. Yet they did not land the same way.

Around 60% of the people who saw the positively framed version were very likely or extremely likely to try it. In the negatively framed version, hesitation dominated. Even the discount could not rescue it.

This is what culture does to moral questions. It strips them down until they are managed as branding problems. Say it the right way, place it in the right context, pair it with enough reassurance, and people move. Phrase the exact same situation in a way that activates doubt, and they retreat.

That may sound cynical, but it is better understood as evidence of how unstable public habits really are. The attachment to meat is often portrayed as deep, ancient, biological, inevitable. Yet here people were being shifted by wording.

That should puncture a lot of inflated claims about how impossible dietary change is. No, a sentence will not abolish the use of animals. But when a behaviour depends so heavily on approval, familiarity, and framing, it is clearly not some immovable fact of human nature either.

The default matters, but meat still carries status

The fourth study tested what happened when participants were served a plant-based option by default and then given the chance to switch to meat for a fee of RMB5. Roughly 45% said they would pay extra to switch to meat. Around 33% said they would stay with the plant-based option. The rest were unsure.

This is where the study stops being comforting.

Yes, defaults can work. Yes, some people will accept the plant-based option when it is simply placed in front of them. But nearly half were willing to pay more for meat even when the dishes looked the same.

That tells us something ugly but familiar. Meat is not just being bought as flavour. It is being bought as reassurance, status, identity, habit, and perceived value. It still carries a kind of prestige. To many people, meat feels more real, more proper, more trustworthy, more worth paying for.

Again, this is not unique to China. The study was conducted in China, but the underlying pattern is global. In different cultures the details shift, but the basic logic stays the same. Meat is treated as standard. Plant-based alternatives are treated as the variation, the compromise, the curiosity, the thing that must justify itself.

That is why simply making alternatives available is not enough. Availability does not erase hierarchy. You can place something on the menu without dislodging the belief that animal flesh is the serious option.

What this study really shows

The most important thing here is not that marketers have found new tricks. It is that the normality of meat is far more fragile than it looks.

If people’s willingness to try plant-based meat rises because they think other people approve of it, then much of meat’s grip comes from collective performance. If positive comments shift intention, then public sentiment matters. If framing alters behaviour, then so-called preference is often just perception under pressure. If a third of people stick with a plant-based default, then meat is not as non-negotiable as its defenders pretend.

But the study also shows the limit of shallow interventions. People may respond to nudges, yet many still cling to meat because the broader culture has taught them that it means something. Safety. satisfaction. normality. identity. That is where the harder work begins.

The use of animals is not upheld by hunger. It is upheld by a worldview in which other beings are commodities, meals, ingredients, outputs, and tools for human preference. That worldview can dress itself up as tradition or convenience or choice, but at its core it is still supremacy. It is still the assumption that the desires of one group justify the use of another.

Plant-based meat does not solve that on its own. A burger made from peas instead of a cow does not automatically produce justice. But studies like this are valuable because they expose the scaffolding. They show how people are moved, what they respond to, and how much of what passes for personal choice is actually social obedience.

That should embolden anyone trying to change food systems.

People are not attached to meat because they have calmly studied the ethics and reached a defensible conclusion. They are attached to what has been normalised around them. That means the task is not just to offer alternatives. It is to challenge what counts as normal in the first place.

Because once a behaviour depends this heavily on approval, repetition, framing, and cues from the crowd, it stops looking like destiny.

It starts looking like conditioning.

And conditioning can be broken.

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People will hear that fibre supports gut health, lowers disease risk, helps regulate blood sugar, and may even help preserve muscle strength as we age, then still reach for the same old line about plant-based foods being “processed” or “missing something”. Meanwhile, the foods doing the most obvious damage keep getting waved through as normal.

Animal flesh contains no fibre. None. Eggs contain no fibre. Dairy contains no fibre. Processed meat comes with salt, saturated fat, preservatives, and well-established links to disease. Yet somehow the panic is aimed at the bean burger.

Your gut microbiome is a living ecosystem that shapes digestion, metabolism, immune function, inflammation, and, increasingly, aspects of health we were only just beginning to understand. One of those is muscle strength.

A recent study found that higher levels of a gut bacterium called Roseburia inulinivorans were linked to better muscle strength in humans. In mice, introducing that bacterium increased grip strength and altered muscle fibres in ways associated with more powerful movement. Older adults in the study had lower levels of it than younger adults, which matters because muscle decline is one of the biggest reasons ageing becomes disabling rather than merely inconvenient.

That does not mean one bacterium is magic. It means yet again the story points in the same direction: feed the microbiome properly and the body works better. And what feeds it properly? Not bacon. Not cheese. Not eggs. Plants.

Roseburia inulinivorans appears to thrive on inulin, a type of fibre found in foods like onions, garlic, leeks, asparagus, and chicory root. In other words, the answer is not buried in some futuristic supplement. It is sitting in the produce aisle. It is in ordinary foods that humans have been eating for generations, and that industrial food culture has spent years sidelining in favour of convenience, habit, and animal-centred meals.

That matters because the microbiome does not just respond to what you remove. It responds to what you actually put in.

This is where people get lazy. They hear that a diet lower in animal products can benefit the gut, then reduce the whole conversation to meat versus no meat, as if that is the main event. It is not. The important question is what replaces it. A microbiome built on chips, white bread, and sugary snacks is not suddenly thriving. A microbiome thrives when it is fed fibre, resistant starch, polyphenols, and a wide range of plant foods.

That is why research comparing vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores keeps finding meaningful differences in gut bacteria. Diets centred on whole plant foods tend to cultivate microbes associated with better cardiometabolic health and beneficial fatty acid production, while omnivorous patterns more often support bacteria linked to inflammation and disease. But the more important lesson is not “vegan” as a label. It is that whole plant foods feed the microbial systems that protect us.

Fibre is the headline because it is what most people are missing and the one animal products fail to provide entirely. Prebiotic fibres from beans, onions, garlic, legumes, and other plant foods feed beneficial gut bacteria, which in turn produce short-chain fatty acids. These compounds help regulate inflammation, support the gut barrier, and shift the internal environment away from the kind of protein-heavy fermentation linked to worse health outcomes.

One of the most useful recent diet trials on this point did not even rely on some purist fantasy diet. Researchers tested a “non-industrialised-type” eating pattern in healthy adults. It was largely plant-based, high in fibre, low in highly processed foods, and designed to reflect some key features of non-industrialised diets. In just three weeks, fibre intake doubled. The participants’ gut microbiomes shifted rapidly. Total short-chain fatty acids rose. Markers associated with plant-carbohydrate use increased. Mucus-degrading features fell. And clinically, things improved: cholesterol dropped, LDL dropped, fasting glucose dropped, inflammatory markers dropped, and participants even lost a little weight despite being fed to meet their calorie needs.

That should have been the end of a lot of bad arguments.

Instead, one detail from that study will probably confuse people who have been taught to think in slogans. Microbiome diversity actually went down, even as the health markers improved. “More diversity” is not the whole story. A more diverse microbiome is not automatically a healthier one if the microbes being fed are the wrong ones. What matters is not diversity for its own sake but what the diet is selecting for. A microbiome full of bacteria adapted to a fibre-poor, animal-heavy, industrial diet is not impressive. It is just responsive to the inputs it keeps getting. This is where the usual ultra-processed food panic also starts to fall apart.

The conversation around plant-based meat has been poisoned by blunt categories and lazy thinking. If a food is labelled “ultra-processed”, many people treat that as the end of the discussion, as if all processed foods are nutritionally interchangeable. They are not. That classification tells you something about how a product was made. It does not tell you everything that matters about what the food actually does in the body, what it replaces, or what its overall nutrient profile looks like.

That is not a defence of every plant-based product on the shelf. Some are rubbish. Some are too salty. Some are low in useful micronutrients. Some are poorly formulated. But the same is true of animal-based foods, and nobody pretends a sausage, a salmon fillet, and a sugary yoghurt are nutritionally identical simply because they all came from an animal.

Recent papers looking specifically at plant-based meat and dairy analogues make this point clearly. These products vary a lot by brand, ingredient, and fortification, but when compared properly, many plant-based alternatives offer more fibre and less saturated fat than the animal products they are designed to replace, especially processed meat. They also generally come with lower greenhouse gas emissions and lower land use. The best ones can function as a practical bridge for people who are not suddenly going to start living on lentil stew and chickpeas seven days a week.

The world is full of people who know they should reduce processed meat, know they should eat more fibre, know they are not going to spend every evening soaking beans from scratch, and still want familiar meals. Telling them the only acceptable future is one made entirely of wholefoods and culinary perfection is not strategy. It is fantasy.

Whole plant foods should absolutely be the priority. That is where the deepest benefits are. Beans, lentils, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, potatoes, oats, and whole grains deserve the spotlight. But pretending plant-based alternatives have no useful role is just another way of keeping animal products in place.

And the data does not support that cynicism anyway.

Researchers modelling realistic UK food baskets found that targeted swaps to plant and fungi-based alternatives reduced greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and water use while keeping diets nutritionally adequate overall. The strongest gains came from replacing processed meat. Fibre went up. Energy intake went down. Environmental impacts fell.

One of the recurring findings in this research is that some plant-based options, particularly meat analogues, still cost more than the products they replace. That is not a failure of the concept. It is a political and economic choice. Governments subsidise animal agriculture, institutions normalise animal products, and food systems are built around their dominance. Then critics point at the price gap as if it emerged from nowhere.

Make healthier plant-based options cheaper. Improve procurement standards in schools and hospitals. Stop treating meat as the default centre of the plate. Support crop production instead of funnelling money into systems that turn plants into animal flesh with enormous waste along the way.

And while we are here, stop treating fibre as some side note.

People are under-consuming it on a staggering scale. In the UK, the vast majority do not get enough. That has consequences far beyond constipation jokes. Fibre affects blood sugar, cholesterol, inflammation, bowel health, microbial metabolism, and likely much more than that. When people swap processed meat for a well-formulated plant-based alternative, fibre intake rises. When they move further toward whole plant foods, it rises again. That is not trivial. It is one of the clearest nutritional upgrades most people could make.

Which brings us back to strength.

Ageing is often discussed as if decline just happens in a vacuum. Muscles weaken. Falls increase. Independence shrinks. But part of that story is dietary. Strength training matters, obviously. People should lift things, challenge their muscles, and stop being sold the lie that ageing means passive surrender. But food matters too. The body is not built from exercise alone. If the microbiome helps regulate muscle function, and if the microbiome thrives on fibre-rich plant foods, then a low-fibre, animal-heavy diet is not neutral. It is part of the problem.

So no, the future of healthy ageing is probably not more processed meat, more dairy, and another scare story about a soy burger. It looks much more like what the evidence already keeps showing us: more fibre, more legumes, more vegetables, more variety, more plants.

And for people who are not ready to build every meal from scratch, carefully selected plant-based alternatives can help move things in the right direction.

That is the part reactionaries hate. The evidence is not asking us to choose between a perfect wholefood utopia and a butcher’s counter. It is showing that there is a spectrum of better choices, and that nearly all of them move away from animal products and toward plants.

Feed your microbiome and it feeds you back.

Ignore it, and your gut, your cholesterol, your blood sugar, and eventually your strength pay the price.

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A recent paper by Tristan Katz asks whether humans should intervene in nature to reduce wild animal suffering. It is not a stupid question. Disease, starvation, parasitism, predation, injury, exposure, early death: these are routine features of life in the wild. Anyone who is honest knows that nature is not a Disney film.

That much is true.

But what follows from that truth is where everything goes wrong.

The interventionist view starts from a moral impulse many of us share. If an individual matters, their distress matters. If we would rescue an injured hawk, treat an orphaned badger, or bring a stranded animal to a rehabilitator, then why stop there? Why not think bigger? Why not vaccinate whole populations, suppress parasites, control fertility, redesign habitats, and eventually use tools like gene drives to alter populations at scale?

This is the point where compassion quietly mutates into administration.

The question stops being, “Should we help this individual in front of us?” and becomes, “Should our species manage the lives of others?” That is a different question entirely. And the answer should be no.

Not because suffering does not matter. Not because wild animals are beyond moral concern. But because humans have shown, over and over again, that we are not humble caretakers standing outside nature with clean hands and perfect judgement. We are the reason so much of the living world is already broken.

Before anyone starts fantasising about engineering wild populations for their own good, let’s be clear about what humans are doing right now.

We are razing forests for animal agriculture. We are dragging nets through oceans. We are poisoning rivers with farm runoff. We are filling land, sea, and air with plastic, harmful chemicals, noise, light, concrete, and traffic. We are fragmenting habitats, destabilising climates, spreading disease, displacing species, and then having the audacity to present ourselves as candidates for benevolent rule.

That is the backdrop to this debate. A species with a record like ours does not get to walk into the wild as if we are neutral problem-solvers.

Katz’s paper is more careful than the average techno-fantasy. It acknowledges ecological complexity, uncertainty, and the risk of making things worse. It rejects reckless interference and proposes a precautionary framework instead, one that gives extra weight to disturbance and irreversible ecological damage. It treats predator eradication in the foreseeable future as too risky. Compared with the usual human appetite for domination, that is restrained.

But the frame is still wrong.

It still treats wild animal suffering primarily as a technical problem waiting for a sufficiently sophisticated manager. It still imagines nature as something we may one day reconfigure wisely. It still centres the human gaze as the one entitled to diagnose, model, optimise, and redesign.

That is not respect. That is empire with better PR.

Wild animals are not failed citizens waiting for governance. They are not raw material for a higher-welfare landscape designed by us. They are not units in a moral spreadsheet. They are sovereign beings living in sovereign communities, with lives that do not belong to humanity.

That sovereignty matters, even when those lives are hard.

This is the part interventionists often glide past. They speak as though suffering settles the matter. But suffering does not erase the wrong of domination. A difficult life does not create an open invitation for outside control. If it did, powerful groups would always have a licence to rule those they judged worse off. Humans have used that logic on one another for centuries. It has never been a route to justice. It has always been a route to paternalism, occupation, and abuse dressed up as concern.

The same pattern is at risk here.

Yes, nature contains fear, hunger, pain, and death. But that does not mean humans are entitled to reorganise it. We are not separate from the problem. We are the most ecologically disruptive force on the planet. We do not approach wild animals as equals. We approach them as a species with a long, filthy history of captivity, culling, breeding, fencing, tagging, shooting, poisoning, relocating, experimenting on, and commodifying other beings whenever it suits us.

So when people say we should intervene to reduce suffering in the wild, the obvious question is: why on earth should anyone trust us?

The interventionist answer is usually some version of this: because we can learn, model, test, and proceed cautiously. Perhaps in urban environments. Perhaps on islands. Perhaps by targeting diseases, or parasites thought to be ecologically replaceable. Perhaps by combining food provision with fertility control. Perhaps, one day, by designing ecosystems that favour longer-lived animals over vast numbers of short-lived ones.

Look at the language there. Targeting. Provision. Control. Designing.

Humans love the vocabulary of management. We use it to make domination sound mature.

But even if one granted the welfare logic, the uncertainty here is enormous. We still do not fully understand the inner lives of countless species. We do not know how to compare experiences across radically different kinds of animals. We do not know how ecosystem changes will ripple through populations over time. We do know, however, that ecological systems are profoundly interconnected, that disturbance has consequences, and that some damage cannot be undone.

And still, some people hear all that and think: yes, let’s discuss gene drives.

This is the trap of human supremacy. We destroy a world we barely understand, then interpret every crisis within it as a further argument for extending our authority.

No.

The starting point should not be compassionate control. It should be principled restraint.

Non-interference does not mean indifference. It does not mean never helping a wild animal in immediate distress. It does not mean shrugging at disasters. It means rejecting the idea that humans should govern the wild. It means recognising that our first duty is not to redesign nature, but to stop assaulting it.

That means ending deforestation for animal agriculture. Ending fishing. Ending the poisoning of waterways through runoff and waste. Ending habitat destruction, fragmentation, and pollution. Ending the presumption that human appetite justifies ecological invasion. Ending the human activities that intensify suffering, destabilise ecosystems, and then generate moral cover for even more interference.

This is where the conversation should begin, because it is where our responsibility is clearest.

It is telling that interventionist debates often leap so quickly past that point. Humans are still funding slaughter, razing habitats, and emptying oceans, yet some people are already eager to discuss whether we should one day suppress predators or genetically alter wild populations for welfare gains. That is not moral seriousness. That is avoidance. It is much easier to imagine futuristic control over nature than to give up the industries destroying nature right now.

And there is another problem buried in all of this: the dream of a suffering-free wild is not just unrealistic, it is deeply revealing. It exposes a distinctly human discomfort with lives we cannot supervise. We want freedom, but only when it looks tidy. We want wildness, but only when it conforms to our moral aesthetics. We say we respect nature, but the moment it offends our sensibilities, some of us start drafting management plans.

Wild animals do not need a human governor because their lives are not ours to edit.

There is a difference between solidarity and rule. Between rescuing where we encounter clear, immediate need and appointing ourselves custodians of entire ecosystems. Between humility and domination. Between recognising tragedy and trying to own the response.

Katz is right about one thing: the conversation is shifting from whether humans should intervene to how they might do so. That shift should worry us. Because once the basic premise is accepted, the only remaining disagreement is over methods.

Reject that premise.

We should not be looking for cleverer ways to interfere with wild animals. We should be looking for ways to stop interfering.

That is the ethical baseline. Not because nature is sacred. Not because every natural process is good. Not because suffering isn’t real. But because the alternative is to hand the most destructive species on Earth yet another justification for power.

Humans do not need more authority over other animals. We need less. The wild is not a broken machine waiting for human repair.

It is a world we have already harmed too much.

Leave them alone.

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For years, we have been sold the fantasy that fishing can be made acceptable with the right labels, the right quotas, the right consumer choices, the right guidebook, the right certification stamp. But what are we looking at now? A species in serious decline, zero-catch advice ignored, “protected” waters still being trawled, and supermarkets scrambling to distance themselves from the fallout after years of normalising the product in the first place.

This is what passes for responsibility in the fishing industry: wait until the numbers crash, then tell people to switch species.

Cod populations in UK waters have been declining since 2015. The main driver is fishing, with warming seas and wider ecosystem disruption worsening the problem by affecting breeding and juvenile survival. Last year, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea recommended a zero-catch policy for 2026 in the North Sea and nearby waters. Not a modest reduction. Not a slight tightening. Zero. That is how bad it has become.

And still, the killing continued.

Instead of following the scientific advice, the UK government announced a 44% cut in cod fishing for 2026. That may sound dramatic until you remember it is still not zero. When a population is said to be approaching the point where safe reproduction is at risk, carrying on regardless is not caution. It is managed collapse.

This is the pattern. First the warnings. Then the watered-down response. Then the same people who allowed the decline to happen start talking about recovery as though it were an unfortunate accident rather than the predictable result of treating living beings as harvestable units.

The same fiction is playing out elsewhere. Mackerel was removed from the Marine Conservation Society’s recommended list after persistent overfishing linked to quota disputes. Waitrose has now said it will stop selling mackerel by the end of April. Again, this is presented as a responsible correction. In reality, it is a late response to a problem that should never have been allowed to reach this point.

And then there is the grotesque farce of marine protected areas.

Almost 40% of England’s seas are designated as protected. The public is encouraged to hear that phrase and imagine refuge, recovery, safety, breathing space. But in the four years to 2024, trawlers caught more than 1.3 million tonnes of fish within these supposedly protected areas. More than a million tonnes came from pelagic trawlers using vast nets that scoop up huge volumes of marine life in one go. Another 250,000 tonnes were taken with bottom-towed gear, including bottom trawlers dragging heavy equipment across the seabed, tearing through marine ecosystems that these areas are supposedly meant to conserve.

So what exactly is being protected?

Not the fish. Not the seabed. Not the ecosystems. Not the future.

What Britain has built is not a meaningful protection regime but a branding exercise. Lines on a map. Good press copy. Ministerial language about biodiversity and recovery, while industrial extraction carries on underneath it all. Protected areas that permit destruction are not protected areas. They are administrative camouflage.

This is why the language of “sustainable seafood” keeps collapsing under scrutiny. It invites people to believe the problem is one of shopping technique, that exploitation becomes acceptable if you swap one species for another, one region for another, one capture method for another. Avoid UK cod, buy Icelandic cod. Skip one trawled species, choose another. Try hake. Try haddock. Try farmed mussels. Try trout.

But this is not a serious moral or ecological reckoning. It is consumer-level rerouting inside an industry built on extraction, commodification, and death.

The public is constantly told to make better choices, while governments refuse to impose the level of protection that the science actually demands. Industry is allowed to keep operating beyond ecological limits, then consumers are handed a seafood guide and told to do their bit. It is absurd. The burden is pushed downward while the killing remains structurally protected.

And beneath all of this sits a deeper assumption that rarely gets challenged: that marine life exists for us to manage, exploit, downgrade, substitute, and consume. If one population crashes, another can be marketed. If one fish becomes too controversial, another can be positioned as the ethical alternative. The individual disappears. The living world becomes an inventory problem.

But collapse is not a labelling issue. It is not a messaging issue. It is not a problem that can be solved by slightly better purchasing habits while trawlers continue to strip supposedly protected waters.

Cod are not warning signs for human shopping behaviour. They are sentient beings caught in a system that treats depletion as acceptable right up until the brink. The same is true for mackerel, whiting, herring, and countless others swept into nets and reduced to tonnage statistics.

If “protected” seas can still be scoured by industrial vessels, then protection is a lie. If zero-catch advice can be ignored while governments congratulate themselves for smaller cuts, then management is a lie. If sustainability means waiting for collapse before shifting consumers to the next target, then sustainability is a lie too.

The truth is much simpler.

You cannot protect marine life while paying for its destruction. You cannot rebuild populations while treating them as commodities. And you cannot keep emptying the sea, then act shocked when it starts to look empty.

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A fresh study made headlines by suggesting that higher ultra-processed food intake around conception may be linked to reduced fertility in men and slightly smaller embryonic growth and yolk sac volume in women. Predictably, the media did what the media does. It turned a nuanced piece of research into a broad cultural warning about “processed food”, as if the category itself explains everything and as if the public hasn’t already been trained to hear “processed” and think “poison”.

But that is not what the evidence says. The study itself was more limited than the coverage made it sound. It found that higher maternal ultra-processed food intake was associated with smaller measurements at 7 weeks, but the associations weakened later in the first trimester. It also found that higher paternal UPF intake was linked with reduced fertility. That is worth discussing. It is not nothing. But nor is it a licence to flatten every food made in a factory into the same moral and nutritional category.

That flattening is one of the most irritating habits in modern nutrition discourse. It gives people the illusion of clarity while making them less informed. A hot dog, a fortified soy milk, a sugary energy drink, a high-fibre plant-based burger, margarine, baby formula, supermarket bread, and a can of beans can all end up caught in the same rhetorical dragnet. Then people wonder why the public is confused.

Of course they are confused. They are being told to fear a category instead of understand foods.

And that confusion matters, because when people hear “avoid ultra-processed food”, they do not all picture the same things. Some imagine fizzy drinks and processed meat. Others start side-eyeing tofu, soya milk, breakfast cereal, plant-based meat, wholegrain bread, or anything with more than three ingredients. The result is not better public understanding. The result is nutritional superstition.

This is where the conversation goes badly wrong.

Not all processing is harmful. Humans have been processing food for an astonishingly long time. Archaeological research has shown that our ancestors were grinding seeds, pounding tubers, cooking starches, and detoxifying bitter plant foods thousands of years before agriculture. Processing food is not some modern corruption of a pure ancestral diet. It is one of the reasons our species spread, adapted, and survived. We are not a species that fell from nutritional grace the moment somebody invented a machine. We are a species that has always transformed food to make it digestible, safe, nourishing, portable, and useful.

So the problem is not processing in itself. The problem is what is being processed, into what, for whom, and with what health consequences.

That distinction should be obvious, but the current UPF discourse often treats it as a nuisance. The category becomes the story. The ingredients, nutrient profile, and replacement effect get pushed aside.

Replacement effect matters enormously. A food does not exist in isolation. People do not eat categories. They swap one thing for another. And when researchers actually examine those swaps, the tidy morality tale around “ultra-processed” starts to wobble.

A review published in Current Nutrition Reports made this point clearly. Ultra-processed plant foods are not the same as ultra-processed animal foods, and in many cases they compare favourably not just with processed meat, but with supposedly “unprocessed” animal products too. Plant-based milks, plant-based meat analogues, and modern margarine are often lower in saturated fat, contain no cholesterol, provide fibre absent from animal foods, and lack heme iron, which has been repeatedly linked with higher chronic disease risk. Replacing cow’s milk with soya milk has been associated with lower total and LDL cholesterol, lower C-reactive protein, and lower breast cancer risk in substitution analyses. Replacing meat with plant-based analogues has been associated with reductions in cholesterol, body weight, TMAO, and ammonia. Replacing butter with margarine lowers cholesterol and is associated with lower cardiovascular risk.

That is the part many people do not want to hear.

The food advertised as “natural” is not automatically the healthier one. The food marketed as simple, traditional, and recognisable is not morally or biologically absolved by its familiarity. Red meat does not become a health food because it can be described as “unprocessed”. Dairy does not become benign because it came from a cow rather than a factory vat. Butter does not become cardioprotective because your grandmother used it.

This is one of the deepest flaws in the way UPF is discussed. It quietly smuggles in the idea that “natural” is virtuous and industrial is suspect. That may be emotionally satisfying, but it is not serious nutrition analysis.

Even some researchers and public health bodies that are otherwise concerned about UPFs have had to admit this. The UK government’s rapid update on processed foods reported that vegetarian alternatives were not associated with adverse health outcomes, while ultra-processed meat, animal products, and sweetened drinks tended to be associated with increased risk. That should have been a much bigger story than it was. Instead, the broader public conversation continues to be dominated by hand-wringing over whether an oat milk or veggie burger is too “processed”, while processed meat keeps slipping through under the comforting glow of familiarity.

This would be laughable if it were not so backwards.

Processed meat has been consistently linked with disease risk. Yet a lot of people who would never touch a vegan sausage because it has methylcellulose will happily eat carcinogenic pig flesh wrapped in plastic because at least it feels traditional. That is not a rational nutritional framework.

And yes, there are serious concerns around many ultra-processed foods. No sensible person needs to pretend otherwise. Diets dominated by industrially manufactured products high in salt, sugar, saturated fat, and low in fibre are not a great idea. A global review in The Lancet argued that UPFs pose a major health threat and called for strong public health action. Fine. But even that wider debate has critics pointing out that the category is too broad to tell us which foods are driving which risks. Correlation is not causation. Lumping unlike with unlike does not become rigorous because it is fashionable.

Some of the strongest signals in UPF research appear to be driven by products like sugary drinks and processed meat. Remove those, and the neat story starts to look much messier. That does not make the issue trivial. It makes it more important to get right. Because when public health messaging gets sloppy, people do not become wiser. They become easier to manipulate.

That is exactly what we are seeing now with plant-based foods. Plant-based meats and milks are being folded into the same threatening category as products with completely different nutritional profiles and effects. Research from Finland has even shown that current classification systems can miss meaningful differences in the biochemical composition of plant-based foods. Some forms of processing reduce useful compounds. Others preserve them. Some, as in fermentation, can improve bioavailability. Yet the public is encouraged to think in crude binaries: processed equals bad, unprocessed equals good. No wonder survey data found that so many people either believe all processed foods are unhealthy or do not know what to think at all.

This is the cost of dumbing down nutrition until it fits a headline.

It also has consequences beyond personal confusion. The more the public is taught to fear “ultra-processed plant foods” in the abstract, the easier it becomes to steer them back toward meat and dairy under the guise of common sense. Suddenly, the cholesterol-free burger with fibre is cast as suspicious, while the corpse of an animal gets framed as wholesome because it is less technologically novel. Suddenly, soy milk is interrogated for ingredients while cow’s milk escapes scrutiny despite its saturated fat, hormones, and links to adverse outcomes. Suddenly, “processed” becomes less a scientific descriptor than a cultural weapon used selectively against plant-based change.

That is why this latest fertility story needs to be handled carefully.

If people take from it that diets high in many ultra-processed products may be associated with poorer reproductive outcomes, fair enough. That is a reasonable point for further research and cautious reflection. If they take from it that men and women trying to conceive may benefit from a diet centred more on whole and minimally processed plant foods, also fair enough. That is hardly controversial.

But if they take from it that the answer is to recoil from plant-based milks, meat alternatives, or other processed plant foods while continuing to treat meat, dairy, and butter as sensible staples, then the message has been mangled beyond recognition.

Whole plant foods should absolutely be the foundation. Beans, lentils, grains, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, potatoes, herbs, spices. That is where the strongest evidence keeps pointing. But transitional foods matter too. Real life matters. Accessibility matters. Convenience matters. The person swapping cow’s milk for soy milk or a beef burger for a plant-based one is not making some catastrophic health trade-off because a factory was involved. In many cases, they are making an improvement.

Public health messaging should be mature enough to say that plainly.

Not all UPFs are equally useful. Not all are equally risky. Not all are equally nutritious. Not all should be defended. Not all should be condemned. And the idea that “processing” itself is the main event is increasingly looking like a blunt instrument masquerading as insight.

The real questions are simpler and harder.

What is this food made of?

What does it replace?

What happens when people eat more of it?

Who profits from the confusion?

And why are animal products so often treated as the default safe option even when the evidence says otherwise?

The media loves a villain, and “ultra-processed food” is a convenient one. It sounds modern, sinister, and broad enough to carry any anxiety people already have about industrial life. But science is not supposed to exist to flatter our intuitions. It is supposed to sharpen them.

So let’s say it clearly: a category that places processed meat and fortified soy milk under the same ominous umbrella is not precise enough to carry public health messaging on its own. A label that encourages people to fear plant-based alternatives more than animal products is not helping. And a culture that hears “processed” and stops thinking is not becoming healthier. It is becoming easier to mislead.

The fertility study is worth attention. It is not worth turning into another anti-plant panic.

Because the real danger here is not just bad food. It is bad framing. And bad framing has a habit of protecting the very foods doing the most damage while demonising the ones that could help replace them.

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Odin, Nuna, Minimus, Tiberius, and Maximus were euthanised after aggression within the pack escalated to the point that staff believed they would kill each other. Three had already sustained serious injuries. The park says it consulted external experts and concluded that killing all five was the only option left. And still, the familiar excuses rolled in. Education. Conservation. Public benefit.

This is how captivity keeps laundering itself. Wild animals are imprisoned, displayed, bred into dependence, denied control over their own space, social dynamics, and future, then when the arrangement predictably breaks down, the institutions responsible present themselves as tragic caretakers caught in an impossible situation.

But the situation was not impossible. It was manufactured.

Wolves are not props for public enlightenment. They are highly social, territorial canines with complex group relationships that evolved in expansive environments, not fenced exhibits. Captivity strips them of the very conditions that make them who they are. It compresses social tension, removes exit routes, and turns conflict into a pressure cooker. Then, when the animals respond as animals do, humans call it a crisis.

What happened at Wildwood did not expose a one-off management failure. It exposed the basic lie at the heart of captivity: that a cage can stand in for a world.

Even Wildwood’s own director is now questioning whether wolves should be kept in captivity at all. That matters, because it cuts through the polished language these places usually hide behind. When the people running the enclosures start admitting that these animals are not easy to keep, what they really mean is that these animals were never theirs to keep.

The conservation defence does not rescue this either. There is a world of difference between protecting habitats and displaying captives. People do not need wolves behind barriers to understand that wolves matter. What they need is a culture that stops treating other animals as educational tools, visitor attractions, and movable assets in human-run institutions.

If seeing a wolf requires that wolf to be confined, controlled, and ultimately killed because captivity made normal social life impossible, then the cost is not educational. It is colonial. It is supremacist. It is the same old story of human desire outranking everyone else’s freedom.

These wolves did not die because wolves are too difficult. They died because captivity is too arrogant.

The question is not whether zoos and wildlife parks can refine how they keep wolves.

The question is why they are still being kept at all.

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For years, greyhounds have been used as disposable gambling equipment. They are bred for speed, pushed around tracks at up to 40mph, and discarded when their bodies give out or they stop being profitable. Broken legs, shattered backs, paralysis, head trauma, drugging, deaths on track, killings off track. This is what sits behind the polished language of “sport” and “entertainment”.

Animal Aid says more than 4,000 dogs were killed or euthanised in the greyhound racing industry between 2017 and 2024. The League Against Cruel Sports says 3,809 dogs were injured in 2024 alone, with at least 123 dying by the track. In Scotland, 13 dogs tested positive for cocaine in a single year. That is the industry. Not an anomaly. Not a few bad apples. The industry.

And still, defenders of greyhound racing want the public to believe the problem is poor regulation, bad management, or isolated incidents. No. The problem is using dogs as commodities in the first place. Once an animal’s body is turned into a source of income, welfare becomes secondary to extraction. Profit demands speed. Speed creates impact. Impact creates injuries. Injuries create deaths. That is not a bug in the system. That is the system working exactly as intended.

Scotland’s last track has already closed. Wales has just one remaining track. The industry is shrinking because public tolerance is shrinking with it. More people are seeing greyhound racing for what it is: a cruel relic kept alive by money, habit, and moral cowardice.

The bans in Scotland and Wales matter, not only because they will prevent future deaths, but because they expose the lie that this industry is somehow culturally important or socially valuable. Valuable to whom? Not to the dogs whose bodies are broken for a betting market. Not to the dogs doped, injured, abandoned, or killed. Not to the public, who are increasingly rejecting the idea that an animal’s fear and physical destruction can be dressed up as leisure.

England now looks even more out of step. The question is no longer whether greyhound racing can be made kinder. It cannot. The question is why any government still permits it.

Greyhounds are not machines. They are not chips in a gambling economy. They are not here to generate money until their bodies collapse.

Scotland and Wales have finally acted like that is true.

England should catch up.

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First we study them. Then we patent whatever we can extract from their bodies, their secretions, or the metabolic tricks evolution handed them. And then, if the product works, we call it innovation.

The latest example comes from python blood.

Researchers studying Burmese pythons identified a molecule called para-tyramine-O-sulphate, or pTOS, which surges after these snakes eat. In the new paper, the authors describe pTOS as the most dramatically induced metabolite they found, rising by more than 1,000-fold after feeding. They also report that chronic pTOS treatment in diet-induced obese male mice reduced food intake and produced a 9% vehicle-adjusted reduction in body weight over 28 days. The findings were published in Nature Metabolism on the 19th March 2026.

That is the headline. “Python blood could pave the way for new obesity drugs.” It sounds futuristic, clever, almost elegant. Nature inspiring medicine once again. But there are at least three different stories hiding inside it, and only one of them is getting the glossy treatment.

The first is the obvious one: scientists may have found a metabolite involved in appetite regulation that works differently from the current crop of weight-loss drugs. Stanford Medicine says pTOS appears to act through neurons in the hypothalamus, the brain region involved in regulating feeding behaviour. In mice, the study found that pTOS suppressed food intake without affecting water intake, energy expenditure, or locomotion, and did not induce conditioned flavour avoidance, which matters because that is one way researchers try to detect whether an appetite-suppressing intervention is simply making animals feel unwell.

The second story is about how badly humans want a pharmaceutical answer to a problem we created.

Obesity does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a world saturated with fast food, engineered hyper-palatability, relentless marketing, sedentary infrastructure, poverty, stress, sleep disruption, and a food culture so warped that people are taught to chase protein bars while ignoring beans. So naturally, instead of asking what sort of society keeps generating metabolic dysfunction at scale, we keep asking which molecule, venom, hormone, peptide, or reptile might rescue us from the consequences.

And the third story, the one routinely pushed offstage, is this: even when the science sounds exciting, humans still reach for the same old model of domination. Study the snake. Isolate the molecule. Inject the mice. Build the company. Sell the solution. That is exactly what happened here.

The researchers were studying the extreme feast-and-famine biology of pythons, animals that can fast for extended periods and then consume huge meals. The paper notes that Burmese pythons can fast for 12 to 18 months and can consume prey equal to their own body weight in a single meal. In the laboratory arm of the study, pythons were fasted for 28 days, then fed meals equal to around 20 to 25% of their body weight before blood and tissue collection. The mice, meanwhile, were used to test whether pTOS altered feeding behaviour and body weight. Some of the pythons were killed under anaesthesia for sample collection. The mice were deliberately made obese through a high-fat diet before daily injections during the chronic treatment phase.

This is what animal use defenders always want us to ignore. The “discovery” is presented as if it floated down from the heavens. As if the only morally relevant fact is the possible outcome for humans. As if the python is just an exotic clue and the mice are just a procedural footnote.

Call it translational science, metabolic research, or drug discovery, and people are trained not to see the individuals being used. The language does the laundering. A python becomes a model of extreme physiology. A mouse becomes a diet-induced obesity model. A brain becomes a feeding pathway. A body becomes data. Once that shift happens, the moral question is treated like an annoyance rather than the starting point.

And yet even within that system, the findings are more limited than the headlines imply.

This is not a new obesity drug. It is not a proven human therapy. It is not even evidence that pTOS will work meaningfully in humans. The researchers found pTOS in human blood after meals too, but the rise was much smaller in most datasets than in pythons. Stanford noted that in five of six public human datasets, pTOS increased after eating, generally by about two- to fivefold. One person showed a much larger rise, but even the researchers could not say whether that translated to greater fullness or lower food intake. The next step, by their own account, is to identify the molecular targets in the brain and determine whether this pathway can be engaged in humans.

In other words, the usual pattern applies. Early animal findings are dressed up as imminent therapeutic hope, the media runs with the most marketable angle, and the public is left with the impression that the suffering built into the process is not only normal but necessary.

Maybe pTOS will eventually help some humans. Maybe it will inspire a useful class of drugs. But there is something bleakly familiar about the route we keep taking. Humans design food systems that wreck health, then scour the bodies of other animals for compounds that might mitigate the issue, all while pretending this is simply neutral progress rather than a civilisation eating its own tail.

There is also a deeper irony here. Pythons are being framed as “metabolic superheroes” because they can do what humans cannot: go long periods without eating, process enormous meals, remodel their physiology, and remain functional. That is fascinating. It is also a reminder that other animals are not crude prototypes for us. They are not unfinished humans. They are not raw material for our drug pipeline. They are their own kinds of beings, shaped by evolutionary pressures utterly different from ours. But human supremacy has a way of flattening every encounter into use.

If a snake has a molecule we like, we do not leave the snake alone and marvel at the animal. We ask how to commercialise it. If mice can be made to mimic a disease state, we do not ask whether we should be manufacturing sick bodies for experimental convenience. We ask whether the effect size is promising enough for investment. According to reporting on the study, the researchers believe pTOS or a synthetic analogue could one day offer an alternative to GLP-1 drugs, which are often associated with nausea and other side effects. That possibility is exactly what makes this story so appealing to the pharmaceutical imagination. And of course there is money in that imagination.

Current GLP-1 drugs have already transformed obesity treatment and generated enormous commercial interest, while scientists are now also studying why these drugs work differently for different people. That is the backdrop for this python story: an already booming market, huge demand for “better” appetite suppressants, and a medical system primed to celebrate anything that looks like the next semaglutide.

So yes, the biology is interesting. Yes, it may teach us something real about appetite signalling. But we should be honest about what else it teaches.

It teaches that humans are still profoundly uncomfortable solving problems at their root. We would rather medicate around the edges of a broken food environment than confront the industries profiting from it. We would rather describe other animals as treasure chests of therapeutic potential than as individuals with their own lives. We would rather celebrate “nature-inspired biology” than admit how often that inspiration depends on capture, confinement, dissection, and death.

The molecule may be new. The mindset is not.

It is the same old human story: create the mess, mine another species for answers, and call the whole thing progress.

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Food is social. Intimate, even. It is wrapped up in routines, power, compromise, identity, expectation, and the thousand quiet negotiations that make up domestic life. What a couple eats together is rarely just about hunger. It is about who sets the norm, who yields, who avoids conflict, who does the cooking, who gets dismissed, and whose values are treated as negotiable.

That matters because when one person wants to reject the use of animals and the other does not, the disagreement does not stay in the abstract. It lands in the supermarket trolley, the takeaway order, the Sunday roast, the date night menu, the fridge, the frying pan, and the tone of voice used when somebody says, “Can’t we just have something normal?”

A new study of 136 couples in Switzerland found exactly that. People did not simply eat according to their own beliefs. They ate in response to their partner’s beliefs too. When one partner believed meat was necessary or especially enjoyable, the other was more likely to eat it as well. When one partner had stronger concerns about the environment or animals, consumption dropped. Not always equally, not always cleanly, but enough to make one thing obvious: what people eat inside relationships is shaped by influence, pressure, and shared habits, not just individual conviction.

That should not be surprising. Shared meals are shared systems. If two people live together, shop together, cook together, plan together, celebrate together, and navigate relatives together, then one person’s appetite is never just their own. One person’s excuses become the atmosphere the other has to breathe.

The researchers examined several familiar justifications for meat consumption, often called the 4Ns: meat is necessary, natural, normal, and nice. Anyone who has spoken to the public about animal exploitation will recognise them immediately. They are the script. Meat is framed as essential for health, part of human nature, socially expected, and too pleasurable to give up. These are not just random opinions people happen to hold. They are cultural tools. They keep the status quo upright.

What the study found is that these beliefs do not stay contained inside the person who holds them. They spread. If one partner thought meat was necessary, the other tended to eat more of it. If one partner thought it was especially nice, the same thing happened. “Normal” had a slightly different role. It reinforced higher consumption most strongly in the partner who already ate more meat, as if social approval gave them extra permission to continue.

This is how norms work. They do not simply sit in the background. They recruit people to defend them.

That is why so many people who are trying to move away from animal products do not just face their own habits. They face somebody else’s certainty, somebody else’s cravings, somebody else’s idea of what a “proper” meal looks like, somebody else’s irritation when the script is interrupted.

And then people still call it a personal choice.

Another piece of research, this time from the UK, found that nearly half of vegans considered incompatible diets a relationship dealbreaker. Because food disagreements are not just about food. They are about dismissiveness, effort, compromise, respect, and whether somebody treats your values as real or as an inconvenience.

The reported problems were revealing. Dismissiveness topped the list. Not making an effort came next. Avoiding meals together. Refusing to compromise. Being closed-minded about new foods.

If one person sees the rejection of animal use as a serious ethical position while the other sees it as annoying, restrictive, or dramatic, they are not simply choosing different dinners. They are operating from different moral universes.

That is where the idea of veganism as a “symbolic threat” comes in. Some people do not merely disagree with vegans. They feel judged by their existence. The presence of somebody refusing to participate can make everybody else feel the shape of what they are participating in. No lecture required. No placard. No speech. Just the quiet fact that one person at the table is not willing to treat exploitation as normal.

That is often enough to create friction.

The Swiss study showed that this friction is not evenly distributed. The partner who usually ate less meat was more likely to eat it when they felt pressured by their partner. The pressure did not meaningfully run the other way. The person eating more meat was not being socially nudged downward in the same way. Only one side was being pushed to compromise.

These disagreements are not neutral. They are not symmetrical. They take place inside a culture where eating animals is still treated as standard, expected, and unremarkable. That means the person resisting it is already in the weaker position before the conversation even starts.

They are not merely disagreeing with a partner. They are disagreeing with the script handed to both of them by family, advertising, tradition, supermarkets, school dinners, pub menus, and every smug little comment about bacon.

So when the lower-consuming partner gives in, that is not proof the couple found a happy middle ground. It is often proof that norms won again.

The study also found something less dramatic but just as important: cooking ability matters. When the higher-consuming partner felt unable to prepare plant-based alternatives, the lower-consuming partner tended to eat more meat.

If somebody does not know how to cook without using animals, or claims not to know, or cannot be bothered to learn, the burden shifts to the other person. Suddenly the question is not “What is right?” but “What is easy?” And exploitation thrives on that shift. It loves convenience. It loves low effort. It loves the exhausted sentence: “We’ll just have this tonight.”

This is one of the most effective ways the status quo reproduces itself. Not through grand ideology, but through somebody standing in the kitchen acting as though beans, lentils, pasta, vegetables, spices, tofu, and twenty thousand recipes do not exist.

The study did find one interesting wrinkle. On days when the higher-consuming partner felt even less capable than usual of preparing plant-based meals, the lower-consuming partner sometimes ended up eating less meat. The researchers suggest this may be because the lower-consuming partner takes over and cooks what they actually want. In other words, once the obstacle becomes obvious enough, the person with the stronger ethics may stop accommodating it.

That, too, feels familiar.

The strongest motives for eating less meat were ethical concern for animals and concern for the environment. Not vague “wellness”. Not abstract health anxiety. Not pandemic prevention. The more people cared about animals and the planet, the less meat they ate. Ethics was the clearest downward force in the entire picture.

That matters because health is often treated as the respectable argument. The safe argument. The socially acceptable argument. But in this study, health was unstable. It could cut both ways. In fact, when the higher-consuming partner valued health, the lower-consuming partner sometimes ended up eating more meat. Why? Because “health” is flexible enough to be hijacked. One person hears “health” and thinks fibre, legumes, and disease prevention. Another hears “health” and thinks protein panic, iron fear, and decades of industry messaging. The word sounds solid, but the content is all over the place.

Ethics is different. Ethics asks a simpler question: should somebody’s body, labour, secretions, freedom, or life be treated as a resource? That question cuts through nonsense faster than debates about macros ever will.

But here is the uncomfortable part. Even ethics is often not enough on its own. Plenty of people care about animals in the abstract and still eat them in practice. Plenty care about the environment and still help wreck it three times a day. Beliefs do not exist in a vacuum. They crash into routine, habit, hunger, desire, convenience, gender roles, social pressure, and the person sitting opposite you asking whether you really have to make everything difficult.

That is why the idea of changing hearts and minds one individual at a time has always been incomplete. People do not make decisions in sealed containers. They make them in relationships. Inside homes. Inside families. Inside friend groups. Inside cultures that reward compliance and punish disruption.

So if we want to understand why animal exploitation persists, we have to stop looking only at what people say they believe and start looking at the social machinery that turns those beliefs into behaviour.

A person can care about animals and still live with somebody who mocks them.

A person can want to stop consuming animal products and still be worn down by jokes, eye-rolls, and “accidental” exclusions.

A person can know exactly what is wrong and still end up eating against their values because they are tired, outnumbered, or made to feel unreasonable.

That does not make them uniquely weak. It shows how strong the norm still is.

The real lesson here is not that couples need better communication around dinner. It is that exploitation survives by embedding itself in intimacy. It makes itself part of romance, hospitality, family bonding, celebration, masculinity, femininity, care, tradition, and domestic peace. Then it dares anyone to challenge it without looking awkward.

That is why rejecting the use of animals can feel so disruptive. Because it is disruptive. It interrupts a system that depends on people treating violence as background and conformity as love. But love that demands moral surrender is not love. It is social control.

If your values disappear every time a menu is opened, those values are not being respected. If one person’s comfort always outweighs another’s conscience, that is not compromise. If shared meals repeatedly drag somebody back into participating in something they reject, then what is being shared is not just food. It is complicity.

The dinner table is political. The kitchen is political. Dating is political. Cohabitation is political.

People do not merely eat what they want. They eat what their relationships normalise, what their routines reward, what their partner pressures them into tolerating, and what their culture keeps presenting as ordinary.

That is the problem.

And it is also why change matters so much when it does happen. Because when one person learns to cook differently, shops differently, speaks differently, refuses differently, and stops treating exploitation as the default, they are not just changing their own behaviour. They are disrupting the social conditions that keep it in place.

The plate is never just a plate.

It is a negotiation over whose values matter, whose excuses survive, and whether justice gets a seat at the table.

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But turkeys are not an ingredient waiting to happen. They are intelligent, social, highly expressive birds with strong preferences, distinct vocalisations, and lives of their own. They explore. They forage. They dust bathe. They roost. They recognise one another. They form bonds. They communicate with a complexity that most people never stop to consider because the entire industry depends on us not considering them at all.

And that is the point. The turkey industry does not merely kill turkeys. It first reduces someone to a unit of production, reshapes their body to suit the market, restricts nearly every meaningful behaviour they are motivated to perform, and then presents the result as normal.

A major 2026 scientific opinion from the European Food Safety Authority lays this bare. It concludes that the current way turkeys are bred, housed, handled, and managed causes a long list of welfare consequences, including restriction of movement, resting problems, group stress, locomotory disorders, prolonged hunger and thirst, respiratory disorders, soft tissue lesions, handling stress, and sensory overstimulation. It also recommends phasing out mutilations, discontinuing flock thinning, reducing stocking densities, improving enrichment, and placing more emphasis on leg health rather than weight gain in breeding goals. In plain English, the system itself is the problem.

That matters, because the industry likes to pretend the issue is a few bad farms, a few careless workers, a few unfortunate lapses. It isn’t. The violence is structural.

Start with breeding. Modern turkeys have been selectively bred to grow so fast, and to carry so much breast muscle, that their bodies no longer even function on their own terms. Male turkeys are too large to mate naturally. Artificial insemination is built into modern production. Breeder males are repeatedly restrained for semen collection. Breeder females are repeatedly caught, restrained, and inseminated. EFSA states that artificial insemination and semen collection are associated with handling stress, soft tissue lesions, bone lesions, reproductive disorders, prolonged hunger, and group stress.

So before a turkey is even hatched, the body has already been redesigned for human use.

Then comes the hatchery. In nature, a mother turkey would communicate with her babies before and after hatching. In the industry, poults emerge into machinery, conveyor belts, noise, sorting, transport, and deprivation. EFSA warns that hatchery conditions can produce umbilical disorders, locomotory disorders, eye disorders, sensory overstimulation, restriction of movement, prolonged hunger, prolonged thirst, and handling stress. Noise above 90 decibels is a recognised problem. Feed and water deprivation beyond 48 hours after hatch is another.

People hear “hatchery” and imagine something gentle. Warmth. New life. A beginning. What it actually means in industrial terms is the conversion of babies into inventory.

From there, the birds are moved into sheds, sometimes by the tens of thousands. The public is sold labels. Indoor reared. Pole barn. Free range. Farm fresh. Premium. But the central facts do not disappear. The birds are still there for use. Their environment is still designed around output, not freedom. Their bodies are still manipulated to serve a market. Their lives are still measured in how efficiently they can be converted into flesh.

The EFSA report identifies space allowance as a major determinant of turkey welfare. Insufficient space directly causes restriction of movement, resting problems, group stress, inability to perform comfort behaviour, and inability to perform exploratory or foraging behaviour. It also worsens heat stress, lesions, respiratory disorders, gastroenteric disorders, and lameness.

Notice how basic these denied behaviours are. Walking. Resting. Foraging. Stretching. Wing flapping. Not enrichment in the fluffy marketing sense. Just ordinary things a turkey is motivated to do.

EFSA also points out something revealing about so-called enrichment. Platforms, pecking materials, visual barriers, dust baths, verandas, and outdoor access are not decorative extras. They matter because without them turkeys are denied species-typical behaviour and pushed towards group stress, lesions, and locomotory problems. Elevated platforms are preferred to perches for heavier birds. Edible, manipulable materials reduce injurious pecking. Restricted access to enrichment increases competition.

This is what “turkey welfare” debates usually conceal. They frame the issue as whether a shed should be a bit better designed, whether the lighting should be less bad, whether the mutilation should be phased out later rather than sooner. But if a system has to ask how much deprivation, crowding, restraint, mutilation, and bodily distortion can be imposed before productivity drops, it is already morally bankrupt.

That is especially clear when you look at mutilations.

Turkeys used by this industry may have their beaks trimmed, toes cut, and snoods removed. These procedures are often justified as necessary to reduce injury in crowded systems. But EFSA’s assessment is clear: these mutilations cause soft tissue lesions and integument damage, acute and chronic pain, handling stress, and in the case of beak trimming, can also interfere with exploratory behaviour, comfort behaviour, feeding, and drinking. Toe trimming affects locomotion and balance. Desnooding may impair thermoregulation and contribute to heat stress. EFSA recommends that mutilations are phased out and explicitly notes that the underlying causes can be addressed through better housing, more space, enrichment, lighting, and breeding choices.

In other words, the industry creates the conditions for aggression and damage, then cuts pieces off the birds to make those conditions more commercially manageable.

The same pattern shows up with flock thinning. Birds are packed into systems that anticipate later removals for slaughter in order to manage space for the ones left behind. EFSA links flock thinning and removal of hens to restriction of movement, resting problems, group stress, inability to perform comfort and foraging behaviour, heat stress, lesions, lameness, handling stress, prolonged hunger, prolonged thirst, and sensory overstimulation. Its recommendation is blunt: discontinue flock thinning.

Again, this is the logic of production. Overfill first. Remove later. Treat the resulting disruption as a management issue.

Then there is the filth.

Excessively wet litter is linked to resting problems, inability to perform comfort or foraging behaviour, lameness, lesions, and respiratory disorders. High ammonia and carbon dioxide levels damage respiratory health, with ammonia also causing eye disorders. EFSA recommends keeping ammonia below levels known to impair welfare and maintaining dry litter below a humidity threshold of roughly 35 to 40%.

Think about what that means. The official scientific conversation is not about whether turkeys belong in these systems at all. It is about how wet the waste can become before the birds’ bodies deteriorate too obviously. How much ammonia can accumulate before their eyes and lungs are affected. How little space can be tolerated before movement itself is impaired.

And still the public is sold picturesque nonsense.

An investigation in late 2025 exposed workers at a turkey breeder in Lincolnshire mishandling birds, ignoring biosecurity, and in one case urinating in a pen of live turkeys. The site supplied poults to farms linked to luxury retail. Red Tractor suspended certification pending investigation. The company called the footage appalling and said it did not represent expected standards. Harrods distanced itself through layers of suppliers. This is how the system protects itself. Individualise the scandal. Isolate the footage. Suspend a worker. Launch a review. Preserve the illusion that what failed was compliance, not the premise. But the premise is exactly what failed.

Because even when the rules are followed, the birds are still bred into dysfunctional bodies, denied natural social and maternal relationships, crowded into artificial environments, mutilated for manageability, transported for slaughter, and killed while still babies.

The slaughter stage is always where the industry’s euphemisms finally run out.

Turkeys are caught, crated, transported, and either gassed or shackled upside down for electrical stunning and throat cutting. EFSA identifies slaughterhouse measures such as footpad dermatitis, plumage damage, carcass condemnations, wounds, breast blisters, and total mortality as indicators of what they endured on farm.

The body arrives at slaughter carrying evidence of the life that produced it. Burnt skin. Damaged feet. Lesions. Bruising. The bird’s body becomes a record of the system.

By the time a turkey is sold as food, the violence has been normalised so thoroughly that the final body is treated as the only thing that matters. Packaging erases the person. Recipes erase the person. Holiday branding erases the person. “Traditional” erases the person. And because the body is now the product, everything that happened beforehand gets reframed as unfortunate but necessary.

It isn’t necessary. It is chosen.

That is the part people do not want to confront. Every turkey sold exists because people keep buying turkey flesh. Every assurance label exists to preserve that market. Every welfare reform discussion that stops at “better standards” leaves the underlying property status intact. The bird still exists as a commodity. Still bred for use. Still managed for yield. Still killed on schedule.

And this is why the language around “humane turkey” collapses under even mild scrutiny. A turkey is someone with interests of their own. Someone whose life matters to them. Someone who can explore, communicate, bond, resist, panic, and experience the world. There is no humane way to convert that life into a product. There is only a spectrum of how much visible damage the industry can get away with before the public looks too closely.

The real issue is not that turkey farming sometimes falls below its own standards. The issue is that its standards are built around use, not respect.

You cannot breed someone into a body that breaks under its own weight, force reproduction because natural mating is no longer feasible, confine them in crowded sheds, mutilate them to make confinement more workable, deprive them of their mothers, expose them to filth and stress, and then call the result welfare because the stocking density was adjusted slightly or a pecking block was added.

Turkeys do not need better exploitation. They need emancipation from it.

It is time to talk about turkey welfare. But honestly.

Not as a branding exercise. Not as a way for retailers and assurance schemes to reassure consumers that the violence was carefully managed.

As a recognition that the whole structure is indefensible.

The turkey industry asks one question over and over: how do we keep this system going with fewer visible consequences?

The right question is much simpler.

Why are we still doing this to them at all?

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A cut from a tool. A blister that broke. A bite. An infected tooth. A fever that did not go away. You either recovered or you didn’t.

Surgery existed, but it was a big gamble. Doctors could operate, but they could not control what came after. Infection. Pus. Sepsis. Death. Childbirth carried higher risk. So did something as ordinary as a sore throat.

People did not “fight infections”. They endured them and hoped.

Then antibiotics were discovered.

Infections that once killed became manageable. Surgery became safer. Modern medicine, as we understand it, became possible thanks to antibiotics.

Now imagine losing them.

The Collapse Has Already Started

Antimicrobial resistance is the process by which bacteria survive the drugs designed to kill them. That process is accelerating.

In the United States, infections from bacteria resistant to last-resort antibiotics rose sharply in recent years. Some strains increased several-fold. These are infections that used to be routine. Urinary tract infections. Blood infections. The kinds of problems modern medicine solved decades ago.

Doctors are already encountering bacteria that only respond to one or two drugs. Expensive drugs. Intravenous drugs. Sometimes, no drugs at all. And many carriers do not know they are infected.

Globally, more than a million people already die each year directly from drug-resistant infections. Within decades, that number is expected to multiply.

At the same time, the pipeline of new antibiotics is shrinking.

Fewer drugs. More resistance.

This Is Not a Medical Accident

You are told this is about misuse.

People not finishing prescriptions. Doctors overprescribing. Patients demanding antibiotics for the wrong illnesses.

That is part of the story.

It is not the main one.

The main driver sits outside hospitals.

More medically important antibiotics are sold for use in farmed animals than for humans. Not because those animals are uniquely fragile, but because the system they are placed in makes disease inevitable.

High density. Confinement. Stress. Waste. Pathogens move fast in these conditions. Faster than the system can tolerate.

So the response is predictable.

Medicate the entire group.

Not occasionally. Routinely.

Antibiotics are not a backup. They are infrastructure.

A System That Cannot Function Without Drugs

A 2025 umbrella review pulled together evidence from 80 studies and mapped how antimicrobial resistance moves through the food system. What it found was not a chain. It was a network. Over forty feedback loops connecting animals, humans, and the environment.

The pattern is simple when stripped down:

Animals are given antimicrobials.

Resistant bacteria emerge.

Their waste carries those bacteria into soil and water.

Water spreads them to crops.

Crops, animals, workers, and wildlife carry them further.

Back into humans. Back into animals. Back into the environment.

Then the cycle repeats.

Continuously.

The system keeps feeding it.

Because when infections become harder to treat, the response is not to dismantle the conditions that caused them. It is to use more antimicrobials.

More drugs. More resistance. More drugs again.

Economics, Not Ignorance

This is not happening because people do not understand the risk. It is happening because the system is built this way.

Antimicrobials keep animals alive long enough to be sold. They reduce labour. They prevent losses. They stabilise output.

Remove them, and the system strains. Change the conditions, and costs rise.

So the drugs remain.

Even when regulators step in, the structure holds. Ban one use, reclassify another. “Growth promotion” becomes “disease prevention”. The language changes. The dependency does not. You cannot regulate your way out of a system that requires medication to stay viable.

We need antibiotics.

Modern medicine depends on them. At the same time, we are feeding those same antibiotics into a system that accelerates their failure. We are destroying the effectiveness of the tools we rely on to survive, in order to sustain a model of production that cannot function without doing so.

There Is No Firewall

There is a tendency to separate things. Animal agriculture over here. Public health over there.

Farms. Hospitals. Environments.

The evidence does not support that separation. Resistance moves through all of it.

From animals to soil. From soil to water. From water to crops. From crops to people. From people to communities. From communities to hospitals. Then back again.

There is no boundary where the problem stops.

The Question That Matters

When people ask why antibiotic resistance is rising, they look for a trigger. A new bacterium. A bad policy. A sudden change.

But the more useful question is simpler. Why did we build a food system that depends on medically important antibiotics?

This is not a flaw in an otherwise functional system. This is the system. And if we want antibiotics that still work, we cannot keep using them to hold animal agriculture together.

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This product is linked to cancer.

In 2016, the World Health Organization classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen. The same category as tobacco and asbestos. Not “possibly harmful”. Not “inconclusive”. Proven.

And yet, a decade later, nothing about how this product is sold reflects that reality.

The Illusion of a “Safer” Bacon

The market response has been predictable.

Not rejection. Rebranding.

Instead of asking whether bacon should be sold at all, the industry offers a workaround:

nitrite-free bacon.

It sounds like progress. It isn’t.

Because the problem isn’t just one additive. It’s the product itself.

You can remove nitrites and still be left with a processed meat linked to bowel cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and early death. You can swap curing methods and keep the same underlying risk. This is how harmful industries survive.

Not by changing the outcome, but by changing the narrative.

“Within Legal Limits” Doesn’t Mean Safe

Recent analysis of supermarket ham found something revealing:

Every single product tested contained carcinogenic nitrates. Every one.

Some had far more than others. But all of them sat comfortably within “legal limits”.

That phrase does a lot of work.

Because it sounds like protection. It sounds like safety. It sounds like someone, somewhere, has decided this level is fine.

But “within limits” just means permitted. It does not mean safe.

There is no safe level of exposure to a known carcinogen, not when we are talking about an extremely optional activity. If a product increases cancer risk, the question isn’t how much we allow.

It’s why we allow it at all.

Tobacco Was The Same

Remember when cigarettes were sold like bacon?

No warnings.

No bold labels.

Just glossy packaging, patriotic branding, and a line somewhere about “consume as part of a balanced lifestyle”.

Tobacco companies were forced to tell the truth. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Now compare that to processed meat.

Same carcinogen category.

Completely different treatment.

Why?

The System Is Working Exactly As Designed

This isn’t a failure of information. The science has been clear for years. It’s a failure of willingness.

Regulators talk about “inconclusive links” while citing outdated caution. Industry bodies talk about “food safety” and “shelf life”. Supermarkets talk about “consumer choice”.

Everyone passes responsibility sideways.

Meanwhile, the product stays on shelves. The packaging stays silent. And people are expected to join the dots themselves.

Some are. That’s why sales are dropping. But most aren’t. Because the system isn’t built to inform them. It’s built to maintain consumption.

And Then There Are Hospitals

If you want to see how deep this goes, look at where processed meat is still being served.

Hospitals.

Places that exist to treat illness are routinely handing out products known to increase the risk of the very diseases they are trying to manage.

There is no ambiguity here. No grey area. Serving Group 1 carcinogens to recovering patients isn’t neutral.

It’s not “balanced”.

It’s not “a choice”.

It’s institutional negligence dressed up as normality.

This Isn’t About Bans. It’s About Truth

Two simple actions would change everything.

1. Put cancer warnings on processed meat

Clear. Unavoidable. Impossible to ignore. Not buried in small print. Not softened with marketing language. The same standard applied to tobacco.

Because if people are going to buy a carcinogen, they should at least know that’s what they’re buying.

2. Remove processed meat from hospitals

Public health institutions should not be serving products that actively undermine health.

This isn’t radical. It’s basic.

The Real Question

People are already changing their behaviour. Quietly. Without being told. They’re switching products. Reading labels. Asking questions.

But they’re being nudged in the wrong direction.

Away from one version of the same problem.

Towards another version of the same problem.

So here’s the question:

If a product is proven to cause cancer,

why are we redesigning it…

instead of rejecting it?

What Happens Next

The “bacon backlash” is being framed as a shift in preferences.

It isn’t.

It’s what happens when reality starts to leak through the cracks of a system designed to hide it.

You can slow that down. You can rebrand it. You can dilute it with “alternatives”.

Or you can do the one thing that actually matters:

Tell the truth.

And let people decide what they do with it.

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After industrial hunting pushed them to the brink, protections brought them back. Slowly. Fragile, but recovering. A rare moment where humans stepped back and the ocean responded.

Now they’re having fewer calves.

Not because they’re being hunted again. Because the system that nearly erased them never actually stopped.

It just changed form.

Southern right whales depend on fat. They spend months feeding on krill in Antarctic waters, building the reserves needed to migrate, carry pregnancies, and nurse their young.

That system is collapsing.

Sea ice is disappearing. The algae that grows beneath it disappears with it. Krill lose their habitat, their food, their structure. They move, or they vanish. And when krill move, whales follow.

Further. Longer. Harder.

Burning more energy to find less food. So the whales start spacing out births. What used to be every three years is now every four.

That is a biological warning.

A species doesn’t need to be killed directly to be pushed out of existence. You just have to remove the conditions that make reproduction possible.

On land, the same pattern looks like “conflict”

When animals can’t find food or water, they don’t disappear.

They move.

And where do they move?

Into human-controlled systems. Farms. Towns. Infrastructure designed to hoard and redirect resources.

Then we call it conflict.

Drought makes this measurable. For every drop in precipitation, reports of “human-wildlife conflict” rise. Not sightings. Not neutral encounters. Conflict.

Predators are hit hardest.

Mountain lions. Coyotes. Bobcats.

They follow prey that no longer exists where it used to. Or they take the only option left, animals confined and bred inside human systems. And then they are killed for it. Not because they changed. Because the world around them did.

Ocean warming. Ice loss. Heatwaves. Drought. Different environments. Same outcome.

Resources collapse → animals move → systems label that movement as a problem → animals are removed.

We don’t experience this as displacement. We experience it as inconvenience.

A whale doesn’t reproduce.

A predator takes a cow.

A bear enters a neighbourhood.

Each event is treated as isolated. Local. Manageable.

But they are all symptoms of the same thing:

A system that has claimed the majority of the planet’s resources, destabilised the conditions that sustain life, and then treats any response from other animals as intrusion.

Even the language is backwards

We say “human-wildlife conflict” as if both sides are participating equally. They’re not.

One side has:

▫️Reshaped the climate

▫️Extracted resources at industrial scale

▫️Built infrastructure that redirects water, food, and land

The other side is trying to survive inside what’s left.

There is no conflict in the moral sense. There is displacement followed by punishment.

Climate change is not the root cause

It’s the mechanism.

The real driver is the system behind it.

A system that:

▫️Treats animals as resources, commodities, or obstacles

▫️Converts ecosystems into production zones

▫️Then destabilises those same systems through emissions, extraction, and expansion

The whales aren’t failing.

The predators aren’t becoming more aggressive.

The bears aren’t suddenly reckless.

The environment that made their lives possible is being systematically dismantled.

And it escalates from here

Heatwaves are arriving earlier. Stronger. In places they didn’t before. Droughts are lasting longer. Expanding further.

The area experiencing extreme conditions is growing.

This doesn’t stay contained.

It compounds.

Food webs collapse in the ocean.

Water disappears on land.

Habitats shrink.

Movement increases.

Conflict increases.

Killing increases.

The illusion of control

We respond with management.

Protected areas. Conflict mitigation. Compensation schemes. Barriers. Deterrents.

All of it operates on the same assumption:

That the system can remain intact, and the consequences can be controlled.

But you cannot stabilise outcomes while destabilising the conditions that produce them.

You cannot remove animals from a system you’ve already made unliveable and call that conservation.

It is a structural injustice.

A system that:

▫️Takes everything

▫️Destabilises what remains

▫️And then punishes the beings forced to adapt

The whales don’t need saving from extinction. They need the conditions required to reproduce.

Predators don’t need managing. They need access to the ecosystems that were taken from them.

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In Scotland, nearly 36 million farmed fish died “unexpectedly” in just three years. That figure doesn’t include those killed during transport, those culled, those who died early in production, or the millions of “cleanerfish” used and discarded by the industry.

That’s not a failure.

That’s the system working.

You don’t build an industry around using bodies as units and expect low death rates. You expect loss, waste, inefficiency, and constant replacement. Because the individuals don’t matter. Only output does.

And when the numbers get too big to ignore, the response isn’t to question the system. It’s to redefine the numbers.

Exclude certain deaths. Reclassify others. Narrow the scope. Control what counts.

Then call it transparency.

Regulation follows the same pattern.

Out of more than 200 salmon farms in Scotland, just 21 were inspected over three years. The worst sites, linked to over 10 million deaths, weren’t inspected at all.

This isn’t oversight failing.

This is what oversight looks like when its job is to protect an industry, not challenge it.

The same story repeats elsewhere. In Tasmania, millions of farmed fish are dying as warming waters make conditions incompatible with the animals forced into them.

And still, the farms remain.

Because the goal was never to respect them. The goal is to use them for as long as possible.

Even the sustainability argument collapses the moment you look at it properly.

Salmon farming doesn’t replace wild fishing. It depends on it.

Wild fishes are caught, processed into feed, and fed to farmed fishes. Entire marine ecosystems are mined to sustain enclosed populations that will be killed anyway.

When researchers accounted for what the industry leaves out, including trimmings, by-products, and uncounted deaths during capture, the picture changed.

Farmed fish can require more wild fish than they produce.

For salmon, it can take multiple pounds of wild fish to produce a single pound of farmed flesh.

So what is this, exactly?

It’s not production. It’s conversion.

Take one group of animals, reduce them into inputs, and pass them through another group of animals to produce something people recognise as food.

Nothing is solved. The violence is just rearranged.

And when the industry tries to escape that reality by shifting to crop-based feeds, it doesn’t reduce impact. It relocates it.

More land. More water. More resource extraction.

The system doesn’t become efficient. It becomes distributed.

Marine exploitation on one side. Terrestrial exploitation on the other.

All to sustain the idea that using animals is necessary.

It isn’t.

And that’s the part everything else is built to avoid.

Because if you accept that animals aren’t resources, the entire structure collapses.

No amount of “better farming” fixes a system based on ownership. No feed innovation changes the fact that individuals are being treated as means to an end. No regulatory tweak transforms exploitation into something justifiable.

So instead of questioning the premise, the system defends itself.

It hides inputs.

It obscures numbers.

It relies on voluntary disclosures.

It withholds data.

And when exposure breaks through, it targets the people doing the exposing.

Activists documenting conditions at salmon farms have been followed, surveilled, profiled.

Not because they were wrong.

Because they were visible.

That’s how you know what you’re looking at.

A system that claims legitimacy but behaves like it has something to hide.

Because it does.

At its core, salmon farming is not a sustainability solution.

It’s the expansion of the same mindset that created overfishing in the first place.

The belief that other animals exist as resources.

That their bodies are inputs.

That their lives are units.

That their value is what can be extracted from them.

Until that is rejected, nothing changes.

Not the methods. Not the outcomes. Not the scale.

Just the story being told.

And right now, the story is that farming fish is progress.

It isn’t.

It’s just exploitation, industrialised, optimised, and submerged.

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You’re buying a story.

Green fields. Blue skies. A cow standing peacefully in grass that looks like it was designed by a marketing team. Somewhere in the background, the environment is being “protected”, the animals are being “cared for”, and your purchase is quietly aligned with your values.

None of that has to be true.

It just has to feel true.

The Shortcut People Don’t Realise They’re Taking

There’s a cognitive bias doing most of the work here.

The halo effect.

Give people one positive signal and they’ll fill in the rest themselves. Environmental claim? Must treat animals well. Sustainable branding? Must be ethical overall. No evidence needed. The brain completes the picture. This isn’t speculation. It’s measurable.

When people are told a dairy company has good environmental practices, they rate that company as treating cows better. Even when they are given zero information about how those cows are actually treated.

Then it goes further.

That assumption about animal treatment directly influences whether they recommend consuming the product.

Not indirectly. Not loosely.

Causally.

Environmental messaging → perceived animal treatment → consumption.

That’s the humane halo.

It Works Better Than Facts

Positive information nudges people.

Negative information hits them.

When people are told a company harms the environment, their judgement of animal treatment drops sharply, and their willingness to consume the product drops even further.

Bad sticks harder than good.

Which creates a strange imbalance:

▫️“Good” environmental claims don’t earn much trust

▫️“Bad” environmental exposure destroys it

That tells you something important.

People aren’t making careful ethical evaluations.

They’re reacting.

Meanwhile, in the Real World

While consumers are busy filling in ethical gaps, the actual data is sitting there.

Dairy produces roughly three times the emissions of plant-based milks per litre.

Methane from cows is a major contributor.

Water pollution, soil degradation, biodiversity loss.

None of this is controversial.

And yet the framing people encounter looks like this:

▫️“There’s no clear winner”

▫️“It depends”

▫️“Maybe just have a bit of both”

The conclusion is always the same. Don’t change. Just optimise. That framing matters.

Because while people are weighing oat vs almond vs soy, the question they aren’t asking is:

Why are we using cows at all?

The Industry Doesn’t Need You To Know. It Needs You To Assume.

Now layer in something else.

Industry messaging.

A UK-backed body produces a report claiming dairy is important for both health and the environment. Not optional. Not neutral. Important.

At the same time:

▫️Dairy is not required at any stage of life

▫️It is linked to increased risk of multiple diseases

▫️Plant-based alternatives outperform it environmentally

This isn’t a misunderstanding. It’s positioning.

“Balanced diet”

“Supports ecosystems”

“Best use of land”

These phrases don’t prove anything. They signal something.

They create the conditions for the halo effect to do its job.

The Missing Piece That Keeps It All Intact

Across all of this, one thing is consistently absent.

The animal.

Environmental articles talk about emissions, water, fertiliser.

Industry reports talk about nutrients and sustainability.

Labels talk about “natural” and “farm fresh”.

What they don’t talk about is:

▫️calves being removed shortly after birth

▫️bodies being used as production systems

▫️the fact that every individual in that system is treated as a resource

So the consumer fills the gap.

If it’s environmentally responsible, it must be humane.

If it’s marketed as natural, it must be acceptable.

The humane halo isn’t just a bias.

It’s a silence people are trained to complete.

This Isn’t Confusion. It’s a System That Works

People aren’t stupid.

They’re navigating:

▫️ambiguous labels

▫️selective information

▫️conflicting claims

▫️deliberate framing

And they’re doing what humans do. They simplify.

But that simplification isn’t neutral. It leads in one direction.

Continued consumption.

Because as long as the product feels aligned with their values, the underlying reality doesn’t need to be examined.

Break the Halo, and the Whole Thing Collapses

The most important finding isn’t that the halo exists.

It’s how fragile it is.

Expose environmental harm, and perception shifts fast.

Introduce the actual treatment of animals, and the assumption disappears.

The entire structure depends on:

▫️partial information

▫️emotional shortcuts

▫️carefully maintained distance from the subject

Remove that, and there’s nothing left to project onto.

What This Really Shows

Dairy doesn’t survive on evidence.

It survives on inference.

Not what people are told.

What they assume.

And those assumptions aren’t accidental.

They’re built, reinforced, and protected.

Because if people stopped filling in the blanks with something comforting, they’d have to face what’s actually there.

And that changes everything.

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