An interview with Juliet Gellately

by Mark Berrimann Juliet Gellatley is founder of Viva! a British organisation dedicated to the promotion of vegetarianism, , health, environmental awareness and animal welfare, particularly in schools. Juliet is author of The Silent Ark, a brilliant and soul-searching account of the international meat industry. Most recently, Viva! has produced a video, Food for Life. Juliet how did you become involved in the vegetarian movement? I became a vegetarian when I was about 15. An agricultural student took me around a model farm designed to promote intensive agriculture. This included beef cattle, which would never see grass in their lives, and calves which were separated from their mothers and kept in individual pens, a pig unit and a battery hen unit. The whole project was to promote the ideology of intensive agriculture. It was the pig unit which I found most distressing because I was looking at hundreds of pigs lined up in this grey concrete building. I didn't have a clue that animals were raised in this way. I was particularly moved by a large boar which was kept in a separate pen. His back leg had gone on him and he was in a dreadful state, hut he dragged himself to the end of the pen and just looked me right in the eye. I looked back at him and that was it! It was one of the most haunting images of my whole life. I kept saying to him ,,I'm sorry, I'm so sorry on behalf of the human race, for what we've done to you". I went home and asked my mother why she had never told me that this is where our meat came from. She tried to dissuade me from going vegetarian hut after about three months she gave up and helped me. I knew from a young age that I wanted to do something with my life to help animals. I went on to study zoology out of both fascination and respect for the animal kingdom hut I still didn't know exactly how I was going to help animals. After I left University I worked for a publication called Media Week for about six months, hut in the back of my mind was the feeling that I had to work in the area of protecting animals. I finally got an interview with the National Anti-Vivisection Society as the editor of their magazine. I had no experience whatsoever in editing magazines! I went for a crash course with someone I knew in publishing and tried to bluff my way through the interview hut they saw through me. Fortunately they offered me a job in research, instead. I was there for a year before I joined the Vegetarian Society as a Youth Campaigner.

What do you think is the most effective way to get the vegetarian message across to the general public? Everybody is different and I think you've got to recognise that, so there isn't one simple answer to that question. At Viva! what we do is to target the message for different audiences. The material we produce for young people is different from what we produce for middle-aged people worried about heart disease and cancer. We do lots of school talks. We now have over a hundred trained speakers. unfortunately, however, school children tend to switch off when we talk about health issues. They tend not to be interested unless it comes under sports education, and you can gain their attention in that way. Generally we find that they are interested in animals and cannot bear the thought of cruelty. They are prepared to go vegetarian very quickly and see this as a positive answer. The school talks are one of the most valuable things we do. We can show them a video with all the health messages, hut where they are most silent and obviously taking in the message is in the factory farming and slaughter of animals, as well as genetic engineering.

Juliet Gellately - founder of VIVA

So, you find it difficult to get the health message across to young people? The big thing on our side is that when you are in a class you can get them to listen to you when you talk about animals, and then point out that it is actually a healthier diet as well. You can point out that their parents may disagree, but if they listen to the health message they can win the arguments. As far as personal reasons are concerned, all young people want to do is to save the world. What we do is simply to harness that enthusiasm. For adults, sometimes shock tactics work, but for others it is a matter of education over time. The BSE (Mad Cow disease) episode was a classic example. We related a lot of health issues to this, pointing out how the meat industry had lied throughout the whole campaign. We said, ,,Hang on a minute! If they're lying about this and they are putting ads out saying beef is perfectly safe to eat, and you know it's not, just start thinking about the other things they are telling us such as beef won't cause heart disease and cancer." What prompted you to start Viva!? I decided I wanted to set up an organisation which was totally campaign based. I worked for the Vegetarian Society for a number of years, eventually becoming its Director. I felt it was becoming more food and health oriented as a society, which is good in one way because it helps people make the change, but my passion was in campaigning on all issues equally, including animal welfare, health and the environment. I actually like to get the message out to all the unconverted. I want to reach the meat eaters. That is what I set up Viva! to do. Did you have any difficulty in gaining access to schools to promote the message? When we first launched Viva! in 1994 I was approached by a company producing a documentary to go out at porno time. They wanted to make a film about Viva! and our work. I later found out that they had a hidden agenda to stop our work in schools. To this day we believe the meat industry was behind this documentary because it was sponsoring so many things in the media at the time. The national newspapers admitted to that. They did this terrible story about Viva! being a major propaganda organisation corrupting our youth. It did cause a lot of damage and after that we tended not to talk to the media at all about our school work. But in answer to your question, yes there are difficulties in schools these days where parents have a lot of power and schools are worried to death about complaints from parents. They think that if a child goes vegetarian the parents might complain. Even if you just talk about health and nutrition, say leaving out animals and the environment, they still fear that the child might go vegetarian. It is a crazy society we live in where people have such silly fears! But nowadays, with vegetarianism as part of the food technology curriculum, they have accepted Viva!. The only way we have achieved this is to have speakers go into schools and to persuade teachers that we are not radicals and exemists, but that we give a sensible talk that is geared up to the curriculum. The teachers love what we do. They love the video and we have sold hundreds of copies to schools. Because of that we are being invited into more and more classes. How do young people react to the idea of vegetarianism? Do they see the link between health, the environment and animal welfare issues? Young people are generally brilliant. The only reason they eat meat is that they have been given it since they were tiny tots. But if you can reach an audience of teenagers, most will agree that the vegetarian lifestyle is a more compassionate one and better for the earth, the animals and their health. What makes them change are the animal issues because they don't try to excuse all the cruelty. They don't see it in economic terms. The issue is black and white to them. They are very honest with you and ask genuine questions. At the end of talk you can ask if any of them would consider being vegetarian and the response rate is anywhere between 60 and 100%. Whether they go vegetarian or not, you have sown the seeds, and they will never see the world in the same light as they saw before. Every time they hear about factory farming they will prick their ears up and say, ,,Oh yes, I've heard about that." You have run a successful campaign involving the removal of exotic meats, including Australian native animals such as the kangaroo and emu, from supermarkets in Britain. Can you tell us about this campaign? We started campaigning against exotic meats just over a year ago. We started with ostrich meat, because ostrich farms wore popping up all over Britain and they were trying to farm an animal which was completely unsuited to the British climate. A few weeks after we ran this very successful campaign, kangaroo meat suddenly started to appear on the shelves. The Australian High Commission promoted the sale of kangaroo meat with great fanfare, telling people that this is the trendy new meat and that you don't need to eat beef any more. The response from the British public was not one of welcome at all. The vast majority does not want to see wildlife killed for meat. There is more than enough meat as it is. What we did was to harness this public feeling using our 480 local youth groups nation- wide. We got them to hold up banners outside Tesco's supermarkets, one of the large British chains. Tesco's has a loyalty card which we enlarged and had pictures of kangaroos being killed on them. This created a lot of publicity and the media loved it. When the groups asked if people realised that Tesco's was selling kangaroo meat they were disgusted. Nine out of ten people supported that campaign. In the end tens of thousands wrote to Tesco's to complain. The campaign produced a doublepage expose in News of the World, the biggest selling newspaper in Britain. Four days later Tesco's withdraw kangaroo meat from their shelves. Amazingly, only a few weeks later Somerfield's, who had introduced crocodile, kangaroo and ostrich meat into 590 stores, suddenly withdraw the whole lot because of the negative public reaction. By the end of 1997 we felt that we had achieved a huge victory for the animals. Basically the British public sees the killing of kangaroos in the same light as the killing of Canadian seal pups. This is probably because of the fact that they are also killed in the industry. The argument is that, environmentally, it is better to farm a native animal than a hardhoofed introduced animal. I think this argument is a red herring. I don't think there is any way that cattle and sheep farmers would be willing simply to farm kangaroos. They just want to farm the kangaroos as well. The status of the kangaroo has been reduced to that of a pest in Australia. It is argued that they compete with existing stock for food, but a major thesis has found that they eat totally different vegetation. It is not the kangaroos which are damaging the environment, but the sheep and cattle. They are trying to promote kangaroo as a health food, but understand that there is a problem with worms in kangaroo meat. According to one wildlife pathologist there are about 30000 nematode worms in one grey kangaroo. Also there is a problem with recently discovered microscopic worms. Kangaroos contain a whole range of parasites which are unfamiliar because they are not a farmed animal. The meat is rot palatable unless it is cooked properly. During your visit to Australia, have you found support for your campaign or do you think we are apathetic when it comes to exploiting our native fauna? I'm surprised that there isn't more reaction from people when it comes to saving native fauna. The danger is that, by commercialising wildlife, the animals will be seen to have no intrinsic value save that of a profitable commodity. We have seen this with elephants in Africa where hunters have claimed that they have a vested interest in saving the animal. The reality is that the elephants have been reduced to rear extinction. The killing of kangaroos is not adequately monitored no matter how the authorities claim that the Code of Practice is sufficient protection. How do you see the vegetarian movement changing in the European Union, particularly in the aftermath of the BSE fiasco? The BSE fiasco obviously spearheaded a lot of change in people's minds and attitudes. Everything to me is about attitude. If you can change attitude, you can change the world. What the BSE scare did was to change the image of beef as being the wholesome food which would appear as the Sunday roast into something that was dirty and that could kill you. It did a better job than the vegetarian movement ever could have done! What had the biggest impact was the meat industry's own image because they maintained right throughout that beef was sate to eat, even when they knew it wasn't. Its image was permanently damaged because it was found out to be lying to the public. The spin-off from this was that we were able to get people to sit up and listen more closely to our health message. Now people are much more willing to listen to what we have to say. Do you think that commonsense and truth will win in the end, or will governments everywhere continue to deceive people when it comes to a showdown between economics and public health? If the political system stays as it is at the moment, then governments will always lie to protect the economy. One of the reasons for that is that multinationals really run the world. They have huge power over governments and are basically interested in shortterm profits. Any other concerns are ignored. In Britain it is the meat and drug industries which are the most powerful, and the drug industry supplies about 40% of its products to the meat industry. It is all very entangled. That is the type of pressure that you are up against. Viva! is only a young organisation, only 31/2 years old, and we literally set up with nothing. What we have on our side is the truth. All you can do is to bang on the drum louder and louder and hope that one day people will begin to see through the lies and propaganda put out by the meat and drug industries. And that is starting to happen. What do you hope to gain from your tour of Australia? What has been wonderful about the whole exotic meats campaign for us is the international cooperation because it has been the Australian organisations which provided the information with which we were able to run the campaign. Considering the distance between Britain and Australia this has been a monumental effort. Many campaigns are very similar, regardless of the country in which they are being run. By sharing resources we minimise costs. Most of these issues are now global anyway, and they are not confined to any one country. For instance, take the kangaroo meat industry. If Australians are reluctant to eat it, which they are, then they try to foist it into other markets such as Asia and Europe. So even if you cannot win a campaign within your own country, you can gain cooperation from other countries to run it on your behalf as far as imports are concerned. One of the nice things about the tour has been meeting people with whom I have been corresponding for a long time. I am now able to put faces to the names on faxes and e-mails! This will strengthen our ties much more. This interview was first published in 'New Vegetarian and Natural Health', winter 1998, the Australian magazin for complete natural health and vegetarian lifestyle. © European Vegetarian Union - http://www.ivu.org/evu