Campaigning against cruelty

Extract

Campaigning animal welfare societies tend to produce promotional material which varies from the cheap and sensational to the authoritative and substantial. The new teaching resource pack put out for use in National Curriculum Stages 3 and 4, ie for age range 11 to 16-year-olds, by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) lies clearly in the latter category. It is made up of some 40 colour slides and a fairly substantial accompanying booklet written by John Callaghan of the CIWF Trust. The colour transparencies, all of which are of high quality, illustrate some aspects of intensive farming, of slaughterhouses, of extensively-kept animals and scenes from CIWF campaigns. The booklet is laid out in parallel order to the slide sequence with an explanatory paragraph for each of the slides. The whole is well produced. It is, of course, educational/promotional/campaigning material and largely presents extreme examples of the good and bad, but it is to a great extent accurate in its facts and realistic in its approach to the problem of man's use and misuse of farmed livestock.