{"id":2894,"date":"2013-03-10T10:21:55","date_gmt":"2013-03-10T00:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/?p=2894"},"modified":"2013-03-11T17:28:06","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T07:28:06","slug":"peasenhallpigs-a-tide-of-change-against-the-noisy-minority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/peasenhallpigs-a-tide-of-change-against-the-noisy-minority\/","title":{"rendered":"#Peasenhallpigs &#8211; A tide of change against the noisy minority"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Peasenhall Primary School in Suffolk, UK, has developed a scheme to educate students about where their meat comes from by raising pigs.\u00a0 Fairly predictably, there has been an abusive outcry from vegans\/animal rights extremists. Organisers received 400+ derogatory emails, calling them &#8216;child abusers&#8217;, &#8216;pointless mothers&#8217; etc.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing especially unusual about any of the vitriol, unfortunately. But what is happening now, in response to this story, is an excellent illustration of some great changes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Twitter is increasingly spreading important messages (specialist messages, particularly) so much more widely (all around the world) and so much more quickly than any other medium.<\/li>\n<li>The fightback against the vocal minority who mistakenly believe they have a monopoly on caring for animals, is gathering speed amongst farmers and commonsense members of the general public, who have a realistic attitude to food, food production and environmental sustainability. &#8220;We&#8217;re really sick of a noisy minority berating us for our personal choices&#8221; is increasingly the message.<\/li>\n<li>Twitter is inspiring farmers worldwide to speak up and providing with them with a united, incredibly strong voice;\u00a0 <strong>&#8220;We care about the land, we care about animals, we care about making good quality food, we have families, live in real communities and deserve to be treated with respect&#8221;.<\/strong>\u00a0 Many who have never every spoken out publicly before are now voicing opinions loudly and encouraging others to do so.\u00a0 The agricultural and common-sense public network on Twitter is incredibly inspiring and it is increasing exponentially!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Animal rights extremists got to social media first.\u00a0 But farmers have woken up and are now swarming to Twitter, Blogs, Facebook and LinkedIn\u00a0 like bees to a honeypot.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Jay Rayner (@jayrayner1) sent out a message regarding the Peasenhall school pigs story to more than 72,000 followers; then this tweet was retweeted 250 times over 8 hours. Make that 251+,\u00a0 because I&#8217;m just about to retweet it on to more than 1,000 people, some of whom I know will send it on to others.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently the &#8220;peasenhallpigs&#8221; hashtag has already reached 340,000 people in the same period.\u00a0 Google or <a title=\"Peasenhallpigs hashtag search on twitter\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/search?q=%23peasenhallpigs&amp;src=hash\" target=\"_blank\">search Twitter for #peasenhallpigs<\/a> to read many excellent messages from other people.\u00a0 <strong>And, of course, voice your own opinion with #peasenhallpigs included in the tweet.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I think historically, #Peasenhallpigs might be seen as a watershed &#8211; the point at which the tide turned against the noisy minority, and a swing back to common sense being less questioned: eat moderate amounts from all food groups, and food as sustainably and humanely produced as possible.<\/p>\n<p>Original <a title=\"BBC story on Peasenhall school's pig raising scheme\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-england-suffolk-21427695\" target=\"_blank\">BBC story about Peasenhall School&#8217;s pig raising project<\/a> &amp; <a title=\"BBC story about the animal rights extremist abuse\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-england-suffolk-21629888\" target=\"_blank\">BBC story about the animal rights extremist outcry<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peasenhall Primary School in Suffolk, UK, has developed a scheme to educate students about where their meat comes from by raising pigs.\u00a0 Fairly predictably, there has been an abusive outcry from vegans\/animal rights extremists. Organisers received 400+ derogatory emails, calling them &#8216;child abusers&#8217;, &#8216;pointless mothers&#8217; etc. Nothing especially unusual about any of the vitriol, unfortunately. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,5,7,221],"tags":[147,160,176,179,222],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2894"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2900,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894\/revisions\/2900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}