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Ill-fated pro-dairy campaign Februdairy drew to a close yesterday, with one market analyst describing the initiative as a ‘complete misfire’.
Throughout the month, anti-vegan activists had floated the idea of using March to promote animal products under the banner of social media campaign #MeatyMarch.
According to reports, the aim of the campaign – which was inspired by the phenomenal success of Veganuary, which encourages people to try and vegan diet during January – is to get consumers to buy British meat products.
‘Meatless’
As in Februdairy, the pro-meat hashtag has so far been hijacked by vegans, with the top 50 tweets all pro-vegan at the time of writing.
An analysis of the hashtag’s performance over the last week shows the top related hashtags are #govegan, #meatlessmarch, and #februdairy.
The most influential tweeters using the hashtag are vegan accounts, with Veganuary clocking in at number two.
Mic the Vegan analyzes Februdairy. Subscribe to PBN’s YouTube Channel here
Opinion
It’s day one of Meaty March, and looking at the hashtag, there seems to be little appetite from the industry to get involved in another social media campaign.
Meaty March was always going to be a harder sell than dairy: for too long, milk producers have been unquestioned, with most believing it is an innocuous practice, and not realizing the systematic genetic modification of animals, artificial impregnation, mother-calf separation, and slaughter that is required to make production profitable.
Meat is another matter: people know that when they are eating a steak, or pork chop, they are directly consuming a slab of flesh from an animal who was born to be killed.
Farming
In addition, it should be noted that lots of farmers disassociated themselves from Februdairy.
Speaking at The National Farming Union’s [NFU] annual conference in Glasgow, NFU Scotland’s president, Andrew McCornick said the initiative wasn’t necessarily a good idea.
He said: “I just feel it adds fuel to the fire, and opens dairy farmers, in particular, to more criticism, and it ends up being counterproductive.”
Many will not want to open their practices up to scrutiny: because the idea of killing an animal is unpalatable to most people, who will avoid engaging with the reality of food production.
Free will
As the campaign’s top tweeter so far says: “If you pay to eat the victim, you also pay to torture the victim.
“You are also deluded if you believe there is such a thing as humane slaughter.
“Animals do not walk into a slaughterhouse of their own freewill.”
