Close Slaughterhouses & Naked Bike Ride: I had mixed feelings about both of the protests I photographed on Saturday June 8th 2019. I began with the vegans whose ‘Close all Slaughterhouses’ march was calling for an end to the breeding, fishing and slaughter of animals and then covered the 2019 Naked Bike Ride.
Close all Slaughterhouses – London
It was a slightly uneasy gathering in Leicester Square for me as I felt rather out of place among a crowd of vegans. I’m against cruelty to animals and certainly oppose cruel farming practices, but I still eat some meat and rather more diary products as a part of a varied diet, and I think my shoes may have been leather and my belt certainly was. My lunch in my bag certainly contained both cheese and ham sandwiches and I’d buttered the bread, so I couldn’t eat it while covering the event.
Of course veganism makes a contribution towards reducing our carbon footprint, as vegetable production generally produces much lower amounts of greenhouse gases, although I think there are some exceptions to this. But I think if everyone became a vegan it would have some very undesirable consequences, not least in almost entirely removing currently farmed animals from our landscape. We might be left with just a few cows, pigs and sheep etc in rare-breed petting zoos.
I’d like to see an end to some agricultural practices which have been adopted to produce meat, and I now quite happily pay extra for free-range eggs and grass-fed beef. But some of the slogans on the banners and placards at this protest are I think over-emotional and misleading. Meat is not murder, we don’t steal milk from cows and animals are not “just like us” though they obviously share many characteristics. As I wrote “the human species is very clearly different in some respects.“
Nature may sometimes be fluffy and adorable, but it is also often “red in tooth and claw”, often killing most cruelly. Many animals are carnivorous, others like us omnivores.
I’d had enough of the vegans after listening to some of the speeches at their rally in Soho Square and walked away – I was in any case getting rather hungry and found a corner away from them to eat my non-vegan lunch.
London World Naked Bike Ride – South Bank
I’ve never been quite sure that the World Naked Bike Ride is really a protest. As I wrote in 2019 “It’s more a fun ride for people who want to ride around London with no or very few clothes on”, though clearly some of them do want to protest over various issues, including the safety of cyclists on the road, reducing oil dependence and saving the planet.
Nudity doesn’t worry me, though as a photographer I spend some time trying to take pictures which show the event without producing images which might offend the more prudish of editors and publications, which is not easy. I wouldn’t take part myself in the WNBR, but largely because our climate is seldom really suitable for being without clothes; of course not everyone on the ride was entirely naked, but I do feel the cold. So were I to decide to join the ride it would be ‘as naked as you can stand’ rather than ‘as bare as you dare’.
Like most of those watching from the pavements I find the ride both entertaining and interesting showing the incredible variation of the human form rather more emphatically than any normal street crowd.
But overall the ride is in some ways lacking in diversity, with relatively little representation of London’s ethnic communities and this year their seemed an even greater than previous gender imbalance, with perhaps 10 or 20 men for every woman. This isn’t truly represented in my pictures partly because of my greater interest in them, but also because a greater proportion of them have slogans or body paint.
I’d arrived late and didn’t take many pictures before the ride moved off – there are a few more on My London Diary. I didn’t bother to follow them or try to meet them later on their route but went to a nearby pub for a drink with a friend before making my way home.