NEWS RELEASE

Tuesday 16 March 2004

AN END TO PIG MISERY AS SCOTPIGS GOES INTO LIQUIDATION

Advocates for Animals, Scotland's leading animal protection organisation,
today welcomes the news that Scotpigs Limited, one of Scotland's major
pig-meat suppliers, will finally stop its trade in animal misery.
Advocates, on three separate occasions, exposed the squalid conditions in
which the animals were being incarcerated on Scotpigs farms.

As recently as December 2003, undercover investigators from Advocates for
Animals filmed undercover inside four Scotpigs farms - Mains of Bogfechel
and Woodlands, both Aberdeenshire; Muir of Pert, Tayside; and Ormiston Farm,
West Lothian.

Advocates' shocking undercover video footage appeared on television news
across Scotland and showed:

* Pigs biting at the flesh of dead companions

* The decomposing body of a piglet, left to rot amongst its other pen
mates

* Sick pigs with open weeping sores

* Dying pigs

* Bins overflowing with dead pigs

  .. Rat infestation
  .. Fly infestation

Scotpigs' Director, Arthur Simmers, known as 'The Pig King' is a former
chairman of the Scottish Pig Association and has previously faced charges of
animal cruelty, although he was subsequently cleared.

Whether by coincidence or not, on the same day that Advocates released this
footage, Quality Meat Scotland (QMS), the assurance scheme which claims to
guarantee "good welfare practices" and is endorsed by the Scottish SPCA,
announced that all Scotpigs farms had had their QMS accreditations removed.

During investigations in 2002, Advocates for Animals exposed similar
conditions on two of the same Scotpigs' farms - Ormiston Farm and Muir of
Pert.  As a result at least one of them, Ormiston Farm, lost its QMS
accreditation.

Advocates' Campaigns Manager, Yvonne Taylor, said:

"Whilst Advocates for Animals welcomes the news that Scotpigs is closing, it
is a shocking indictment on our legislation that Scotpigs is being closed
purely on financial grounds. Our video evidence showed these intelligent and
sentient animals being kept in horrendous conditions - crammed into barren
pens with little or no bedding and forced to live in their own excrement. We
found sick pigs with open weeping sores, dying pigs, piglets pulling at the
flesh of dead pigs, a rotting piglet, bins overflowing with dead pigs, fly
infestations, dead rats and rats running all over the place. This alone
surely should have been enough to immediately close Scotpigs farms.  Sadly
these kinds of conditions appear to be accepted as the norm - this is the
shameful reality of intensive pig farming in Scotland."

- ENDS -