Sainsbury's

Kangaroos are gentle, sensitive and intelligent creatures. Sainsbury's PLC condones their butchery for financial profit. The helpless roos are slaughtered in scenes of medieval cruelty. Photographs of what is done to the animals and their babies are simply too horrific to be shown here.

        Grotesquely, kangaroo meat is publicly offered for sale in an ostensibly respectable UK supermarket, Sainsbury's. But behind every sanitised meat product sold in a Sainsbury's store lies a story. It is a bloody, gruesome and horrific story that Sainsbury's don't want you to know.

        Sometimes today, kangaroos are killed for fun in the name of 'sport'. Sometimes, they are killed to gratify a macabre human fancy for new forms of dead animal flesh. Sainsbury's only justification for what they do is that it boosts profit margins and executive pay packets.

        Kangaroo babies, the helpless joeys, are often clubbed to death too. Every night, young kangaroos suffer a slow and lingering agony after their mothers have been shot and bludgeoned. The orphaned joeys eventually starve or die of hypothermia.

        The pretty pictures of animals found on these pages can only disguise the sordid realities of the meat trade itself.

        Somehow the atrocities must be stopped.

        Sainsbury's, meanwhile, are successfully making money from the nightly bloodbath. Quite legally, the superstore chain markets kangaroo flesh as 'exotic meat'. Such euphemisms hide atrocities of a viciousness and cynicism it is hard to imagine.

        Human greed and callousness have few limits. In the light of history, it is diffucult to be shocked at the nastier extremes of human behaviour. Yet profiting from this vile and gruesome business is morally indefensible in any civilised society. In all conscience, Sainsbury's and their ilk should be banned from doing so by law.

        Consumer boycotts of companies like Sainsbury's which promote suffering on such a scale may appear to be only a small and token gesture. The amount of pain in the world can easily seem to dwarf all our attempts to minimise it. We must simply do our best, however little that may be.

        For moral arguments do have a habit of becoming easier to appreciate when they coincide with financial self-interest. We must hope that Sainsbury's reconsiders its policy of stocking exotic meats after weighing up the moral dimension - and perhaps their company balance-sheets - once more.