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Television personality and farm owner Jeremy Clarkson has said that he “doesn’t particularly like” sending his animals to slaughter.
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Clarkson first started farming around five years ago and went on to star in the reality TV show Clarkson’s Farm for Amazon Prime. The program documents his initial attempts to manage the “Diddly Squat Farm” in Oxfordshire, where Clarkson rears sheeps*, pigs, and cows.
In an interview for The Sun Showbiz, Clarkson described the difficulties of raising animals for food, including unpredictable illness and death as well as taking them to slaughter.
“When your animals are sickly or dying, it’s awful,” said Clarkson. “I don’t particularly like sending them off to market, or to the slaughterhouse, to be brutally honest.”
In the interview, he also discussed his recent heart health scare. He said that having stents placed in his arteries means he can no longer eat certain animal products, which have been repeatedly linked to elevated heart disease risk.
“It all has to stop. I mean really, all of it,” he continued. “I’m not allowed now to eat sausages, bacon, beef, pork, lamb, anything fried, apparently egg yellows are bad.”
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Slaughtering animals ‘phenomenally difficult’
Despite repeatedly expressing disdain for people who choose not to eat animal products, the new interview is not the first time Clarkson has described the reality of farming animals for food – and inevitably having them slaughtered – as a challenging experience.
In 2023, he described feeling “gut-wrenching loss” when taking animals to slaughter, saying it was “bad enough with the sheep and worse with the cows.” When taking pigs to slaughter, Clarkson added that he can “never” sleep properly the night before. “All the way to the slaughterhouse I have what feels like a hot cricket ball in the pit of my stomach.”
In 2021, ahead of the launch of Clarkson’s Farm, there were reports that Clarkson found his first experience of taking animals to the slaughterhouse “phenomenally difficult.”
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*While the English language usually refers to multiple sheeps as “sheep”, we use “sheeps” to emphasize that they are individuals.
