No Porkies Visits Major UK Cities

With help from vegan hot dogs vendor Vdogs, No Porkies visited Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and London giving out free vegan hot dogs and promoting veganism as a kinder, healthier and more environmentally-friendly lifestyle choice.

Shockingly, every year in the UK 10 million pigs are slaughtered for meat. The vast majority of these pigs are factory farmed and never see the light of day. Many are subjected to overcrowding, painful mutilations, diseases, injuries and stress which often results in cannibalisation due to sheer boredom. Our high profile investigations, such as Hogwood, expose the reality for pigs in Red Tractor-endorsed industrialised farms.

Sadly, most people don’t realise the shocking and cruel reality of where their sausage sandwiches come from. No Porkies set out to change perceptions by celebrating the amazing, positive qualities and unique personalities that pigs have, as well as the way they are treated in factory farming.

The World’s Smartest Sandwich

Whilst people queued for their delicious free hot dogs, campaigners had a chance to chat with them about our campaign. Showing them our ‘World’s Smartest Sandwich’ leaflet, many people were unaware that pigs naturally live up to around 20 years old, and are, in fact, smarter than dogs!

With the help of our amazing volunteers across the country, Viva! campaigners had some great conversations with the British public, highlighting pigs as one of the world’s most eaten animals, as well as exposing the suffering they have to endure in factory farming. Most people were shocked to see the conditions many pigs live in, and many had never seen images like that before.

The hot dogs went down a treat with most people saying that they couldn’t tell the difference or preferred them to meat sausages!

“Can I be honest? It tastes the same! I can’t tell the difference!”, said a very surprised man at our Manchester event.

A teenage girl at our Bristol Street Action exclaimed; “That’s actually really good, and I’m not just saying that because I’m on camera – I actually prefer it!”

The sausages were so popular that we ran out early for our first two events and had to order extra sausages to keep up with the demand. We went through over 1,000 vegan sausage samples over the four events – that’s over a 1,000 opportunities to open up someone’s mind to trying vegan.

It didn’t stop with Viva!’s own events either. We extended our reach down to the South West where one of our amazing volunteers ran their own No Porkies event in Truro, Cornwall

Next year we’re keen for more volunteers to run similar events of their own, so if you’d like to give it a go in your local area please get in touch with us at campaigns@viva.org.uk.