EVERYONE who detests what is happening in Britain's abysmal factory farms and slaughterhouses now has a great opportunity to express their revulsion.

We all know that the suffering is indefensible and that there is an urgent need to end it.

By supporting Viva's first ever national campaign against factory farming you can take an important step towards doing just that.

Our undercover investigations have exposed the sad reality of so-called welfare standards none more so than the Pig in Hell expos, which showed exactly how pigs have to live in 18 UK pig units.

We know that what we filmed is typical of thousands of other units overcrowding, pigs covered in their own excrement, sick and injured animals left unnoticed and untreated.

At some farms, dead and rotting piglets were left among their living siblings.

It's a similar story on poultry farms. Chickens and turkeys spend their short lives grossly overcrowded, standing on wet and soiled litter which burns into their skin, causing painful ulcers.

Birds are routinely given antibiotics in an attempt to prevent the diseases which run rife in the squalid conditions.

We are all now paying the price for this stupidity with the blossoming of uncontrollable, deadly superbugs which threaten our children's future.

Claims that killing is humane are also untrue. Viva has filmed inside slaughterhouses and our footage shows animals who are not properly stunned regaining consciousness while bleeding to death.

How can we say that we are a nation of animal lovers when we allow millions of animals to be reared and killed in such appalling conditions?

As so often happens in life, our actions come back to haunt us.

Our institutionalised, mass abuse of animals has produced one disaster after another BSE, swine fever, foot and mouth and wasting diseases.

It has also created dangerous human diseases which are now spreading like wildfire such as antibiotic-resistant strains of salmonella.

To ignore these warnings is stupidity itself because if we don't act now to end factory farming, it may well end us.

Please show your support for Viva's campaign to end factory farming by signing our online pledge at www.factoryfarming.org.uk.

You can also withdraw your support for animal abuse by going vegetarian.

For more information and a free go veggie pack, contact Viva at 12 Queen Square, Brighton BN1 3FD, tel 01273 777688.

(Mrs) A BURGE

Burns Way

Swindon