Posted June 2, 2026
The UK campaign treating factory farming the way we once treated tobacco
In England and Wales, roughly 90% of pigs are killed in CO₂ gas chambers — a method the industry markets as humane. The government's own Animal Welfare Committee concluded otherwise in October 2025, finding that exposing conscious pigs to high concentrations of CO₂ causes pain, respiratory distress, and fear — what the report describes, behaviorally, as screaming, gasping, and frantic attempts to escape. The same advisory body recommended ending the practice back in 2003. More than two decades later, it is more common than ever.
Project Slingshot exists to close the gap between what we permit and what we would accept if we actually looked. Its opening campaign — Don't Buy It — placed more than 750 ads across 206 London Underground stations and another 2,200 inside Tube carriages, each one challenging that single word, humane. When Slingshot polled the public, 81% of Britons called the practice unacceptable. The point is hard to miss: this persists not because people approve of it, but because almost no one knows it happens. As actor Sir Mark Rylance puts it — "The industry knows we'd object if we knew. So they made sure we didn't."
What makes the campaign worth studying is its strategy. Slingshot is modeled explicitly on the anti-tobacco and anti-drink-driving efforts that came before it: slow, sequenced, high-visibility "drumbeats" designed to make a harmful practice socially indefensible rather than merely illegal. Co-founder Naomi Hallum calls the industry's framing "industrial-scale gaslighting" — "while the pigs get gassed, the rest of us get gaslit." The backers (Diane Morgan, Rylance, Dr. Amir Khan, Paul, Mary and Stella McCartney, MP Neil Duncan-Jordan, and others) supply the one thing that dissolves moral disengagement: attention. The stated goal is to end factory farming by 2040.
It is tempting to file this under British problem. It isn't. The United States runs the same practice at the same scale: of the roughly 130 million pigs slaughtered here each year, an estimated 90% are killed with CO₂ gas — nearly 120 million animals — yet because the pigs are sealed inside the machinery, federal inspectors cannot actually observe the deaths the law obliges them to certify as humane (Animal Welfare Institute, 2023). What the industry has worked to keep unseen, activists have dragged into the light. In the documentary Pignorant (Carbstrong, 2024), investigators Joey Carbstrong and Dan Sheppard smuggled cameras into a Pilgrim's Pride abattoir near Manchester and filmed pigs lowered in metal gondolas into the gas — thrashing, screaming, and gasping for a minute or more before they fall still. It is footage almost no one chooses to watch, and that is exactly the point: the practiced not-looking that lets us eat what we would never stomach seeing is the carnism, and it operates here at home too. New Yorkers can't vote in Westminster, but the lever is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: look at what is actually happening, refuse the product, and refuse the story that sells it.
Visit Project Slingshot →
Read the broader mission at endfactoryfarming.com. Closer to home, send the octopus email above, browse our NYC plant-based directory, and support the US groups doing this work.