Happy pigs sell more

“You are what you eat”, if this was what the advertising men at Tesco had in mind while working on the new tv ad of Tesco Butcher’s Choice sausages in the UK, we can easily see why they decided to make the ad about a bunch of pigs happily scampering around an idyllic country. Because let’s face it, if you are what you eat, it must be hard enough to insinuate that your customers are pigs, without telling them that they are also victims of intensive farming.

Unfortunately the advertising watchdog was not sympathetic with the difficulties encountered by the advertising men and suspended the commercial, saying that it misleadingly implied that the meat used for the sausages was from free-range pigs.

“The pigs were shown wandering unrestricted outside and, within the indoor barn scene, the barn door was shown to be open and the pigs’ movement unrestricted”, said the regulator.

 According to Tesco however, the commercial was not misleading and the pigs had reared to world-class nationally-agreed welfare standards.

The suspension of the commercial re-launched the controversy over intensive farming and Tesco had already been in the storm center. Although the company’s  avowed commitment to develop a production system to deliver better animal welfare in fact, Tesco has been reprimanded by  Compassion in World Farming (CWF) and has been at the center of the campaign “Stop being rotten to chickens”. As a matter of fact Tesco accounts for more than one-fifth of all intensively-reared chickens sold in the UK but voted against the adoption of higher welfare standards.