FRANCE : ''ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS''

PARIS: Hundreds of animal rights campaigners from a range of groups marched through Paris on Saturday calling for the closure of all abattoirs.

Activists wearing red T-shirts sounded drums and shouted slogans, in what organisers called the Red March, to denounce the slaughter of animals for human consumption.

Placards carrying images of farm animals and poultry highlight what they say is the suffering they have to endure. “Behind each piece of meat is a sensitive being,” read one.

The march was organised by the L214 group, which it says campaigns over the living conditions of farm animals, as well as the way they are transported to slaughterhouses and killed. Organisers said the march attracted 3,000-4,000 people.

Some marchers carried the banners of France’s Animalist Party and other animal rights groups.

Police arrested a small group of activists after they threw fake blood over the statue of Marianne — which symbolises the French republic — in the city centre’s Place De la Republique.

“We are here to say that it’s not because an individual is different from us that it has less value,” Hugo Bouxom of L214 said. People’s taste for the pleasures of food had more value than the lives of animals he added. “There is a consensus around the question of animal well-being today,” he said. [AFP]