Did you have a meat-free Christmas dinner this year?
Plant-based food is now so varied and readily available, the chances are that you replaced some, or all, of your traditional Christmas dinner with quorn pigs in blankets, vegetarian sausages, or a nut-roast.
If you stuck with tradition, did you buy a free-range turkey?
Sadly, millions of turkeys are still reared in intensive conditions in the UK, with limited space to move around in dimly-lit barns with no daylight.
As with factory-farmed chickens, the birds are bred to produce as much meat on their breasts as possible, which means that they often struggle to walk and they lead miserable, short lives.
This article won’t go into graphic detail about how turkeys and chickens are slaughtered, and the inadequate minimum welfare standards that prevail, but please take time to do your own research.
One of the highlights of 2021 for the ManxSPCA was being able to rescue three factory-farmed chickens that had somehow appeared on a back road in Ronague.
They were skeletal, had prolapsed oviducts from excess egg-laying, and two had had their beaks trimmed (i.e. the ends of their beaks had been cut off to prevent them pecking each other in overcrowded conditions).
Sadly, we were not able to trace where these birds came from - in fact, it would seem that poultry producers can operate on the Isle of Man with very little regulation or inspection.
Food for thought indeed, and another reason to ensure your only buy free-range eggs and meat.
The three ’Golden Girls’, as we called them, went on to make a full recovery and were re-homed to a family who adore their pet chickens and who give them the life they deserve.
Public awareness is the key to animal welfare standards being raised, and monitored, and the spotlight of late has been on decapods, which include crabs, lobsters and crayfish, and cephalopods which include squid and octopuses (or octopi).
A recent review by a London university concluded that these species are sentient, and that they are capable of feeling pain and emotion.
The review calls for a ban on lobsters and crabs being boiled or dismembered alive, as they are in some restaurants, without first being stunned with a specialist instrument - and it recommends that the fishing industry should be banned from declawing crabs.
It also calls for a review of the killing of octopus and squid at sea because none of the existing methods are humane - and a ban on the importing of farmed octopus.
Octopuses have the largest and most complex brains of any invertebrate, and they have been observed behaving in surprisingly sophisticated ways.
Some have been shown to use large seashells as defensive tools, while others build and transport shelters made from coconut shells - both signs of cognition.
Plans for a large commercial octopus factory farm in Spain have recently been announced.
The farm will produce 3,000 tonnes of octopus a year, and the company involved says that this will help to protect octopuses in the wild, and stem the decrease in their population size.
But many conservationists and marine biologists have condemned the planned farm on the basis that octopuses are an unsuitable species for being farmed, and that the practice cannot be done ethically (one wonders, though, whether any animal factory farm is ethical).
Octopuses are solitary, territorial creatures and need stimulation and enrichment, and life in a barren tank surrounded by other octopuses would be inhumane.
If the farm goes ahead the creatures bred there would receive little protection under European legislation because EU law covering farm husbandry, housing and slaughter only applies to vertibrates.
So, if you’re thinking of making a New Year’s resolution why not aim to double check the provenance of the food you eat, particularly if it’s meat or sea food?