Butchers in France have recently asked police to better protect them and their shops against vegan activists who seek to impose their meat-free lifestyle on the entire nation,

In a letter to France’s Interior Minister, Jean-Francois Guihard, president of the French Confederation of Butchery, Butchers and Delicatessens (CFBCT), requested better police protection for the 18,000 professional butchers in the country, many of whom have become the targets of vegan activists. In April, seven butcher shops in Hauts-de-France were sprinkled with fake blood, and a butcher shop and a fish shop had their windows broken and their facades vandalized with the spray-painted inscription “stop to speciesism“.

Photo: Joxemai/Wikimedia Commons

“We are counting on your services and the support of the entire government to stop, as soon as possible, violence, physical, verbal, moral suffered by the honest professionals that we are,” Guihard wrote in his letter. “For several months, the 18,000 butchers and butchers of our country have been worried about the consequences of the over-mediatisation of the vegan lifestyle.”

He made it clear that he didn’t expect the police to station personnel outside every butcher shop, but to monitor vegan activist groups to prevent attacks that he likened to “terrorism”.

“For it is the terror that seek to sow a few individuals or organisations that have only one purpose: to remove, simply, a whole section of French culture which owes so much to the expertise of its artisans,” the CFBCT letter read.

Guihard placed part of the blame for recent attacks by vegan activists on the media, for “over-hyping” the meat-free lifestyle, but said that his association had nothing against vegans and vegetarians in general.

“Not at all. If they refuse to eat meat, that’s their choice,” the CFBCT president said. “We just want people to respect our craft and our customers, which means the majority of French people. Vegans are in a small minority.”