It’s been an incredibly busy and successful couple of months at Animal Justice Project as we exposed yet another hidden corner of the UK egg industry in part two of our Rotten campaign.

We organised a successful demo against RSPCA Assured outside the gates of AD Harvey’s slaughterhouse, and mounted a pressure campaign and petition which resulted in getting AD Harvey dropped from the welfare label. As well as that, our team took a trip to Vegfest London, where we got the opportunity to connect with others in the animal rights movement and deliver talks about this year’s campaigns.

Chicken catchers

In October, we released part two of our Rotten investigation series, this time focusing on the dark world of chicken catching ‘gangs’. Our undercover investigation, exposing the never-before-filmed catching process of end-of-lay hens, landed national press coverage and was covered by all of the major newspapers and featured on ITV News.

Our viral photocall

In October, we rallied our supporters to take part in a social media photocall. We aimed to reach as many people as possible with our CaughtRedHanded hashtag and our demand to tell RSPCA Assured to drop AD Harvey permanently. We reached over 50,000 people across our socials and generated 6,000 engagements!

RSPCA Assured success

We mounted a pressure campaign to demand that RSPCA Assured drop the catching company, AD Harvey, from their assurance label, in light of our investigation findings. Our petition gained over 6,000 signatures, including Peter Egan and the late Benjamin Zephaniah who also recorded this touching message about our investigation.

On 1st November, World Vegan Day, we joined a dozen other activists at the gates of AD Harvey’s slaughterhouse for a peaceful protest. We held placards and slowed vehicles from entering the facility. Unfortunately, the police became heavy-handed, leading to the arrests of three of our activists. We gained local press coverage from Norfolk Live.

As a result of this sustained pressure, RSPCA Assured announced a permanent ban of the catching company from their assurance label. This is a resounding success as it will likely mean cause them to lose around a third of their business.

We went Vegfest London

Our team headed to Vegfest at London's Olympia in November – one of the UK's biggest vegan festivals!

This year's theme was 'animal rights', so our Campaigns Manager, Ayrton and Campaigner, Tayana, gave talks featuring this year’s campaigns and investigations. Ayrton also joined a panel discussion with Animal Aid, Viva!, Animal Rising, and We The Free titled: 'Unifying the vegan movement: Collaborative Strategies for Collective Impact'.

We had a stall selling our merchandise (our new beanies were particularly popular!) and promoting our latest campaign materials. We had lots of inspirational conversations with like-minded individuals and organisations – a very successful weekend!

Moving into 2024, we have a lot of big plans ahead, and we aim to end the year on the high, so keep an eye on our socials in the coming weeks!

As always,

For the animals.