Welcome to Viva! and welcome to our new website, written specifically to help people change their diet. Viva! is an active campaign group working to end the cruelty endured by billions of animals, determined to stop the destruction of our planet, fighting to bring an end to the starvation that blights the world’s poorest people and explaining how to live longer, healthier lives. If you share these goals, you can start to help us achieve them today - and it’s simple. Change your diet!
It’s Time to Go Veggie goes through all the reasons why what we eat is so important. The government won’t tell you that meat helps cause diseases such as strokes, heart disease, cancers, obesity, diabetes and a string of other ailments - adult diseases which are now beginning to affect children for the first time in our evolution. The food industry won’t confess that animals suffer acute mental and physical distress in their living and dying. Few are prepared to admit that global poverty and starvation are directly linked to our affluent lifestyles and meat production. And every effort is made to obscure livestock’s role in destroying the global environment. The reason? Short-term, economic self interest is more important than long-term survival.
I founded Viva! in 1994 to campaign on all these issues and in that short time, we have grown to be the largest active vegetarian and vegan organisation in the world, with offices in the UK, USA and Poland. We base our arguments on sound science and we provide visual proof with undercover filming. When we talk about cruelty, we can prove it with covert video footage. When we say that modern agriculture is unsustainable we can point to the research that shows it. When we say it’s essential to act now to preserve our beautiful world and its creatures, few would argue because the need is self evident. The good thing is that our headline-grabbing campaigns are helping countless people to understand that the power to change the world ultimately lies in their own hands.
Humans played no part in creating the extraordinary range of life that inhabits our planet but are extremely callous and efficient when it comes to destroying it. The pretence that only our lives and interests matter is the philosophy that’s got us into this mess. Across the world, 55 billion farmed animals are slaughtered every year and to build a way of life based on such epic suffering is not only mind-bogglingly cruel it is ultimately disastrous.
There is a better way of living based on compassion and caring and it can start right here. Join Viva! and add your voice to ours because together we can make a difference.
Yours for change
Juliet Gellatley
Founder & International Director
