Slaughterhouses & Naked Cyclists: Five years ago today on Saturday 8th June 2019 I photographed a march by vegans through the West End, leaving them at their rally in Soho Square and photographing people taking part in the London World Naked Bike Ride on my way back to Waterloo Station.
Close all Slaughterhouses
Vegans were marching in London calling for an end to the breeding, fishing and slaughter of animals.
I’m not a vegan, and as my comments on My London Diary make clear I do not find some of the arguments that they make so forcefully to be well-founded or convincing.
As I state there, “Of course I’m against cruel farming practices, and much is wrong in various ways about some modern farming, but keeping animals and killing them for food or milking them can be done in a decent and humane way and one that has an important contribution to our environment.“
But I am an unrepentant what they call ‘speciesist’, believing that although other animals share many of our characteristics they are not as these vegans were chanting “just like us” and that our species is in important respects different.
But vegans are a good thing in that a plant-based diet certainly does make lower demands on the environment, and I’m happy to eat vegetarian food several days a week, though not to be either a vegetarian or a vegan.
Given the way things are going with a failure of societies around the world to respond adequately to the increasing climate chaos it seems quite likely that our species will become extinct. And the farmed animals which appear on many of the posters carried in this and other vegan protests will also die out. They are the product of centuries and more of breeding by us and most could not survive in the wild. Farm animals rely on farmers as much as farmers do on their animals.
But there is certainly no doubting the sincerity, anger and dedication of these vegan protesters and this is reflected in the many posters and placards and the anger of their protests which I think comes through in my pictures. I just wish more of them would show the same support for protests over human rights abuses too.
London World Naked Bike Ride – South Bank
The World Naked Bike Ride says it is a global protest movement with rides in cities around the world, raising awareness of issues such as safety of cyclists on the road, reducing oil dependence and saving the planet. They say “Let’s make the planet great again!”
And although for some it clearly is a protest, for many I think it is, as I wrote “more a fun ride for people who want to ride around London with no or very few clothes on.” And I can see nothing wrong with that as “For those of us watching on the streets it is certainly unusual and entertaining, and I think very few could be seriously upset by it. The normal response seems to be a lot of pointing and laughing.”
There were around a thousand cyclists “in various states of undress, some with face or body paint or slogans on their bodies” in the ride, having started from several places some miles away who converged on the South Bank to ride together past St Paul’s Cathedral and then to Buckingham Palace before finishing the ride at Hyde Park Corner.
The great majority of the riders were men. My pictures concentrate on those people who stood out because of their body paint or slogans which included a considerably larger percentage of the women taking part – and I think most of the men who had these were taking part with their female partners.
The WNBR dress code is ‘as bare as you dare‘ although footwear is obligatory for safety reasons. I don’t have a problem with nudity, but am aware when photographing this event that many publications would not use more revealing images, and try and ensure that at least some pictures have strategically placed handlebars or other objects. But my pictures of the WNBR from earlier years did get complaints from some American educators who blocked my site from their students. And on the front page for June 2019 I includeD the warning “These pictures involve nudity. Please do not click on the link if you may be offended or if you are in a place where others may be offended.”
If you go into London today you may well see this year’s ride. More from 2019 at London World Naked Bike Ride.
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