SUPERMARKETS are moving to higher-welfare animal products; are you?

A recent survey recognised the positive decisions made by supermarkets stores to improve the welfare of animals.

Marks and Spencer won the compassionate supermarket of the year award in 2007, with Waitrose in second place, followed by the Cop-op, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrisons, Somerfield and, lastly, Asda.

The fact is that supermarkets are changing and now it’s down to us to make sure this momentum is carried forward.

Our supermarket choices can have a real impact on how farm animals are reared. So let’s use our trolley power and make responsible choices about the food we buy.

By choosing free range or organic products we are supporting a growing movement towards higher welfare farming. When buying animal products beware of terms like “farm fresh”, which are purely a marketing ploy and mean nothing in terms of animal welfare.

If you can’t find free range or organic products in your supermarket then please ask for them. Let supermarkets know that you care. Animals should not and need not suffer. If you agree please help us stand up to those who put profit before animal welfare. For more information please contact compassion in World Farming on 01484 521953.

Ms K Stephenson

Upper Cumberworth

Wrong on ‘destruction’

THERESA Quarmby’s latest letter to Mailbag (January 9) contains a great deal of factual and common sense concerning sexual morality, but is probably wrong to believe that “destruction of the family will ultimately mean that there will be few people willing to care for the elderly, disabled and the weak”.

The present government (as other governments will feel obliged to follow) is throwing vast amounts of money at close family members (named as carers) who used to consider it their natural duty to care for free as in, for instance, “in sickness and in health, till death us do part”.

Also to professional carers, often propping up, at great public expense, inadequates who have surrendered to the difficulties of life and are granted lifetimes of self-indulgent idleness. David Cameron, to his credit, has started saying that malingerers and the phoney sick should be compelled to become productive.

The countless billions of public cash are creating, to a large extent, many naff jobs which are non-productive, simply passing cash around, and artificially improving employment figures, of no creative value to the economy.

Theresa Quarmby, unfortunately, as a misguided Catholic, spoils herself at the end of her letter by saying “our God is absolute, eternal and unchanging”. She cannot possibly know anything about this imaginary, illusory God as it is manmade, a convenient device to describe the unknown and unknowable.

This device is used by cunning, or weak, or ignorant persons to control others, or foist human responsibility on to some imaginary Deity to carry the can for those who, like Tony Blair, chooses to be judged by this thing for his crime of going to war spuriously with Iraq.

jake the rake

Lindley Moor