By Matthew Cox 14:01 30 Dec 2023, updated 14:01 30 Dec 2023

A vegan activist who confronts McDonald's customers with pictures of factory farming and slaughterhouses has urged Brits to rethink their diet choices as 'we're a nation of animal lovers'.

Tarion Partridge, 25, has been vegan for over five years - an activist for three of those - and said that as we live in 'the easiest place to be vegan', it makes it even 'more of an injustice' to not be one yourself.

According to YouGov tracking, despite increasing commercialisation and accommodation of the vegan lifestyle, the proportion of the UK population has remained at roughly two or three per cent since records began in 2019.

Speaking to MailOnline, Ms Partridge asked:'How can you claim to love animals with the same mouth you chew their bodies with?

'People are very ignorant to what happens.They don't witness the slaughter, they just see these packaged up bodies.'

Ms Partridge's TikTok and other social media pages are flooded with clips of her and meat-eaters clashing over the morality of eating animals.

Her posts range from confronting customers at fast-food chains, to discussing veganism on the street and even clashing with employees at fast-food restaurants who ask her to not show pictures of animals in factory farms or slaughterhouses to their customers.

Responses range from people trying to quietly brush her off, many seeming sympathetic with her motivations but not her cause and the occasional few who take real issue with being challenged.

In one video from November 2023, Ms Partridge stops someone on their way to order a meal at McDonald's and asks if she likes animals.

The customer replies to say 'I do but I'm not going to stop eating them'.

She continued: 'I like meat, it's just nature.'

As the woman leaves Ms Partridge tells her to order the chain's vegan burger: 'If you care about animals, you should live in alignment with that and be vegan.'

Some meetings are more confrontational than that.

'Most of the reactions I've had are pretty good,' she recounted, 'but I had a bit more of tougher one in KFC once where this lady was super unhappy, and was like, "you know people are being killed in the world, and why would we care about chickens?"

'And I said to her that I don't kill people or chickens, because that doesn't really have any relevance.'

Staff at the chain were then asking her to leave, but she resisted until they threatened to call the police.

But any of the more nerve-wracking interactions do not deter her, and she says that when she is feeling uncomfortable, 'I just have to think of the animals'.

'You can't really spread a message without getting out there and sometimes pushing the boundaries, doing something a little bit controversial,' she said.

'People want activists to be silent. They don't want to feel guilty. But if you look throughout history activists are never silent.

'Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.'

The 25-year-old was raised in Lincolnshire as a meat-eater, but had an 'epiphany' aged 15 when she was eating chicken and wondered what the real difference was between that and her beloved dog, Saxon.

She went vegetarian straight away and a few years later upon realising that much of the dairy industry involves calves being removed from their mothers within hours of their birth, she took the leap to go vegan.

'I think I'm a compassionate person,' she said, 'and I want to live in a line with that.'

But it took until January 2020, when Ms Partridge met her partner and vegan activist Joey Carbstrong, that she began going even further by protesting against and researching the meat and dairy industry.

However, she pushes back on the common assertion that vegans are 'extreme' or 'overbearing'.

'I get called extreme and pushy and all things like that all the time,' she admitted, 'but I just think that you have to push back on that and think: What's more extreme, me showing the people what they pay for, or the fact that they pay for animals to be tortured in farms and violently executed in murder factories?

'If I was in a dog meat restaurant showing footage of dogs struggling in fear and being murdered, I'd be a hero.

'Nobody would be saying, 'that's extreme,' but because I'm defending pigs, chickens and cows, all of a sudden I'm extreme?

'That highlights the speciesism in our society. People need to realise that there's no moral difference between a dog and the animals that people eat.'

One of Ms Partridge's views that people might find extreme, though, or at least counter-intuitive, comes in response to one of the replies she often gets from the public.

Animals eaten by consumers are bred specifically for that purpose - they would not exist if they were never going to be eaten - but she is would rather live in a world without those billions of animals altogether.

'They shouldn't exist like this,' she asserted, 'chickens have been bred to grow at this accelerated rate, turkeys as well.

'I think if I was an animal I would rather not exist than exist in a body where I'm suffering and where I'm gonna be sent to a murder factory.'

While Ms Partridge insists that 'there will be a day where we look back with pure shame and regret' at our meat consumption, meat-free enterprises are struggling to stay afloat.

The cost of living crisis has had a doubly bad effecton the industry, with consumers turning back to meat and dairy to save cash, at a time when business would have been more expensive anyway.

Heather Mills' VBites is the latest plant-based brand to fall into administration, following the falling sales of beyond meat and closures of roughly half of the UK's Veggie Pret stores.

Sir Paul McCartney's ex-wife Ms Mills blamed 'nefarious practices' and a 'litany of lies' from animal-related rivals for the collapse of her vegan food empire.

Read more from the original source:

I'm a vegan activist - I show McDonald's customers pictures of slaughterhouses and factory farms and ask them: - Daily Mail