Peter Roberts was one of the leading international champions of farm animal welfare. In 1967 he founded Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) to campaign for humaneness in the rearing of food animals and turned this tiny organisation into the largest, most prominent and effective opponent of factory farming internationally.
A tireless crusader for the welfare of farmed animals, Roberts notched up many victories on their behalf. Most notably, CIWF succeeded in persuading European Union politicians and bureaucrats to reclassify animals as “sentient beings” in EU law, a remarkable achievement that is now bringing about a profound change in the way that animals of all kinds are regarded.
Peter Roberts was born in 1924 in Staffordshire, where his father was a GP. After serving in Malaya and Burma at the end of the Second World War, he studied for a diploma in agriculture at Harper Adams Agricultural College. He married in 1955 and with his wife took up dairy farming in Hampshire.
This was a time when factory farming was expanding rapidly to satisfy the rising postwar demand for cheap and plentiful food. Roberts found himself increasingly perturbed by the cruelty of industrial farming practices. Vast numbers of hens were reared in small battery cages, pregnant pigs were kept in metal-barred sow stalls, and calves were held in narrow veal crates. For Roberts it was evident that such animals were deprived of everything that makes life worth living.
His concern deepened in 1964 when Ruth Harrison published her seminal book, Animal Machines. It detailed for the first time the cruelty of intensive animal farming, and prompted an outcry which induced the Government to set up an inquiry the following year. The Brambell inquiry called for factory-farming restrictions — the call went unheeded by the Government, but Roberts’s time had come.
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He approached the leading animal welfare organisations, inviting them to launch a campaign against the battery cage. When they proved reluctant, he took matters into his own hands. He founded CIWF and with a tiny staff began to organise campaigns for farmed animals. These soon attracted the support of such celebrities as Celia Hammond, Joanna Lumley and Spike Milligan.
CIWF encourages vegetarianism but it does not aim to convert people to vegetarianism — it aims merely to achieve the humane and fair treatment of farmed animals. However, the horrors of factory farms soon persuaded Roberts himself to give up meat. As CIWF grew, he quit farming and founded a company, Direct Foods, to import and market textured soya protein. He also established the Bran Tub, a health food store in Petersfield, Hampshire, which is still run by his family.
In 1984 Roberts led CIWF into a private prosecution about the cruelty of a veal-crate unit run by monks. He wrote: “The monks of Storrington Priory in West Sussex do not keep a fatted calf; they keep 650 which they rear for white veal in narrow and barren crates. It may be argued that God blessed the calves, giving them four legs and the good earth to walk upon, but the wooden crates that imprison them now do not permit the calves to walk, nor exercise, nor even so much as to turn round . . . On their all-milk diet the only fibre they find is hair plucked from their own bodies, or splinters from their wooden crates . . . The monks say that the Scriptures allow them to do these things and that anyway animals cannot really suffer.”
The case failed in the magistrates’ court and in 1985 the High Court also found for the Priory. However, the litigation attracted huge media coverage, and although Roberts lost the battle he was well on the way to winning the war. Shortly afterwards he was invited — most insistently — by the Ministry of Agriculture to a seminar at Stoneleigh Agricultural Centre in Warwickshire. There the junior minister, Donald Thompson, made the surprise announcement that the Government had decided to ban the veal crate. The law came into effect in Britain in 1990 and, thanks to CIWF’s international campaigning, the veal crate will also be outlawed across the EU from January 1 next year.
The UK veal-crate success inspired Roberts to other campaigns on behalf of farmed animals. This activity led, for example, to the banning in 1999 of narrow stalls and chains to keep pregnant sows. Instrumental to this ban was scientific research commissioned by CWIF, a hard-hitting video and a huge public petition.
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While campaigning energetically for specific changes in the rules, Roberts did not lose sight of his more radical goal. It was in 1988 that he announced to his CIWF team that the best way to bring long-term benefit to animals was to win them a new legal status as sentient beings — under existing European law they were classified simply as “goods” or “products”.
Once again he approached the larger animal welfare organisations for support, but his proposal was dismissed as politically naive. Undaunted, he led CIWF to launch a Europe-wide petition calling for the EU to grant animals this new status. By 1991 it had attracted more than one million signatures and was presented to the European Parliament — the largest petition it had received. Six years later a protocol on animal protection, which recognised animals as sentient beings, was agreed by EU Prime Ministers and attached to the Treaty of Amsterdam.
By that time Peter had developed Parkinson’s disease and had left the helm of CIWF. He had not drawn a salary from the organisation since he started it 24 years earlier.
His contribution to animal welfare was recognised by awards from leading organisations, including the RSPCA and the British Veterinary Association’s Animal Welfare Foundation. In 2001 he won BBC TV’s first award for outstanding contribution to animal welfare and the following year he was appointed MBE.
His legacy is both the animal-protection legislation he helped to win and the organisation he founded. CIWF now has some 30,000 supporters, has representatives in 11 countries and works with 32 kindred organisations in 24 European countries.
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Peter Roberts is survived by his wife, Anna, and their three daughters.
Peter Roberts, MBE, founder of Compassion in World Farming, was born on June 7, 1924. He died on November 15, 2006, aged 82