Butchers in France have asked the government for police protection from animal rights activists, claiming their security was being threatened and that vegans were trying to impose a meat-free lifestyle on the nation. The French federation of butchers wrote to the interior minister saying shops had been sprinkled with fake blood and covered in graffiti. It claims that a growing media focus on veganism was threatening butchers’ safety.

The letter said France’s 18,000 butchers were worried about the consequences of “excessive media hype around vegan lifestyles”, and that vegans wanted to “impose their lifestyle on the immense majority of people”. “We count on your services and on the support of the entire government so that the physical, verbal and moral violence stops as soon as possible,” the federation wrote.

Seven butcher shops were vandalised and sprayed with fake blood in the Hauts-de-France region in the north of the country in April. Other incidents were reported in southern France. A butcher and a fishmonger in the north had seen windows broken, with the slogan “Stop speciesism” left behind in spray-paint by the vandals.

It is not only purveyors of meat who have faced the wrath of the animal rights activists: last year a cheesemonger in Lyon said his shop was painted with the words “milk is rape” and “milk is murder”. In March, a vegan cheesemaker was given a seven-month suspended jail sentence for condoning terrorism after she said on Facebook that she had no compassion for the supermarket butcher killed in a terrorist attack on a store in Trèbes and likened being a butcher to being a murderer.(theguardian)…[+]