Juliet Gellatley
Juliet Gellatley is the international founder and director of vegan campaigning charity Viva! and its sister groups, Viva! Poland and Viva! Uganda. Juliet became vegetarian in her teens after managing – against the odds! – to visit a pig factory farm; and then became vegan. She has spent her working life campaigning on behalf of animals. After obtaining a degree in zoology and psychology, she became the Vegetarian Society’s first youth campaigner in the 1980s (when she launched Greenscene, Britain’s only magazine for young vegetarians, and was its editor) and quickly rose to become the Society’s campaigns director then director.
On 26 October 1994, she launched Viva!; Europe’s largest vegan campaigning charity. Juliet has since created and launched numerous campaigns on the disastrous repercussions of eating animals, not just for them but also for the planet and our health. High profile campaigns have included fighting the cull of kangaroos in Australia and ending its sale in all UK supermarkets, and causing the collapse of the ostrich meat trade in the UK. She launched the long running campaign End Factory Farming Before It Ends Us, and has investigated many pig farms for multiple campaigns from Pig In Hell to Hogwood, and dairy farms for White Lies, followed by Scary Dairy. She has helped expose the barbaric treatment of cows and calves in the dairy industry.
Juliet has also investigated many other farms – often the big names – and exposed the devastating cruelty inherent in animal farming. She was the first person to start presenting the horror of factory farms in front of the camera as a campaign – which she named Face Off, which was taken to many cities across the UK, changing the hearts of many.
Juliet is the author of several reports and guides and producer of the award-winning documentary HOGWOOD: a modern horror story, available on Amazon Prime and Netflix. She is also producer of Viva!’s first TV ad, Take Away the Meat (reaching 38 million people) and co-produced the UK’s first cinema ad, Bringing Hope to Millions. She produced videos that went viral as part of 3 in 4, a campaign that she created which reached millions of people during the Covid pandemic exposing the link between wet markets, factory farming and infectious diseases.
Juliet became a qualified nutritional therapist in 2005 and launched several health campaigns with her colleagues Dr Justine Butler and Veronika Prošek Charvátová, under Viva!’s health and nutrition arm, Viva! Health. They have promoted the benefits of being vegan and also exposed the damage being wrought by consuming animals. Juliet has particularly focused on the negative health impacts caused by dairy but has also written guides on vegan health.
Juliet is also the author of The Livewire Guide to Going, Being and Staying Veggie!, The Silent Ark: A Chilling Expose of Meat – The Global Killer, and Born To Be Wild: The Livewire Guide to Saving Animals. Juliet has given many hundreds of talks, radio, Podcast and TV interviews and received awards including the Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain: Animal Welfare Award, Cosmopolitan Woman of the Year: Education, the Australian Wildlife Protection Council’s Wildlife Protection Award, the People Environment Achievement National Award, and the St Francis Award from Catholic Concern for Animals.
“As a teenager the seeds for Viva! were sown. I witnessed the sheer scale of animal suffering – rows upon rows of pregnant pigs confined to cages, gnawing on their metal prisons. There was one particular pig which has stayed with me forever. At the end of a row of sow stalls, there was a large boar who dragged his exhausted body towards me. He looked straight at me, his sad, deep eyes staring into mine. In that moment, I knew I would dedicate my life to saving animals.”
