There’s a marvellous charity my daughter made me aware of, Compassion in World Farming. That’s something else this blog is about – compassion to all creatures, not just the human kind. We are of course desperately poor at showing compassion to other human beings much of the time, so we can hardly expect animals en masse to get a look in. Family of course is another matter, and pets are part of family, so our compassion there is absolute.

Compassion as an attitude, a state of mind, compassion toward the world, toward all of life, is transformative.

3000 pigs died earlier this week in a fire in Northern Ireland – scarcely a footnote in the news. It’s indicative of the way we keep animals. Three sheds, I assume 1000 pigs per shed.

Some piggeries are out in the open – they catch your eye as your driving – for example, on a hill above the M4 in the wilder bit of Berkshire, near Blythburgh in Suffolk. They’re not especially attractive to look out, and pigs and green grass don’t co-exist easily. The animals providing most of our meat we never see, and they hardly see daylight, so green grass or no I love to see piggeries.