Vic Shepherd (Opinion, March 22) highlights our hypocritical attitude towards animals and meat.

He says we shouldn't be showing close-up views of slaughtered animal body parts being burnt on farms but is presumably quite happy to see the same body parts wrapped in clingfilm on supermarket shelves.

Farmers and the public are saying how terrible it is these poor "innocent" animals are being slaughtered, yet turn a blind eye when the same animals are transported for public ritual slaughter in French public parks, where sheep are often hacked to death with bread knives.

Those not destined for the annual Id al-Adha slaughter are often sent on horrific journeys to Greece and other Mediterranean countries, where the survivors are commonly slaughtered without pre-stunning.

Recent footage of our own slaughterhouses has shown animals being kept and slaughtered in horrific conditions. Indeed, the farm where the foot-and-mouth epidemic started had dead and dying pigs in with the healthy, and newborn piglets being eaten by adult pigs.

Where are the tears for the 500,000 newborn male calves sent to the slaughterhouse every year? These unwanted waste products of the dairy industry are torn away from their mothers, loaded on to trucks and killed at a few days old simply because they have no value.

The reality is that this continued slaughter of "innocents" goes on day after day behind the closed walls of the slaughterhouses. The animals we see being slaughtered are the lucky ones. They have been humanely slaughtered in their own fields. At least they won't have to endure the trauma

of transport and the market or the horrors of the slaughterhouse. Perhaps it is true that if slaughterhouses had glass walls we would all be vegetarians.

-Frank Prince-Iles, Sunnydale Avenue, Brighton