What does the term "concentration camp" mean to you?

By then, they can barely walk, so they are helped along with electric prods. If the stress makes them aggressive, their faces are smashed in with an iron bar to quiet them down. Their food consists of the cheapest possible corn and vegetables, mixed in with the dead, partially decomposed bodies of their friends who couldn't stand it any more. For a special treat, they sometimes get to eat their own sh*t.

There are inmates of both sexes. The female inmate is forcibly impregnated. She gives birth and weans her children, while constrained in an "iron maiden" which totally stops her moving. She cannot nuzzle her children, as she desperately wants to - in fact, she cannot even turn round to see them.

She lies in her own excrement. Her children are taken away from her after a few weeks, and she will never see them again. To save money, because she herself isn't going to be eaten, she is given barely enough food to keep her alive. When she is finally worn out, she will be thrown in a pile with her friends and left to die. Some concentration camps go even further to save space.

The inmates are stacked in rows, so that the excrement from the ones above drips constantly onto the ones below. In their natural environment, pigs are a lot cleaner than humans. Until recently, humans living in cities threw their excrement out into the street. Wild pigs, on the other hand, have a special dunging area as far away from their home as possible.

They don't like lying in sh*t any more than you would. Because of the unhygienic conditions, foul air, stress and poor diet, the inmates are always getting ill. So they are fed antibiotics with all their meals. When the time comes to realise the "purpose" of this atrocity, the inmates are shipped thousands of miles on the back of a truck, without food or water. If it is hot, many of them will collapse from lack of water. If it is freezing cold, the skin of the ones at the edge of the truck may stick to it. This will be cut off while they are still alive.

Before they are killed, they are supposed to be stunned, so that they don't feel any more pain. But this costs money, and has to be done properly. Very often, it isn't. So they may well be still alive while they are suspended from the ceiling by a chain, dipped in scalding water and slowly, agonisingly, dismembered.

If pigs were free, they would live much like their ancestors, the European wild boar. These animals live in small closely-knit family groups, and wander around the forest looking for food. They are very sociable, and sleep in a communal nest. They protect each other's children from predators, and help each other to find food. Like dogs, they enjoy having their tummies rubbed.

They are intelligent, sensitive and inquisitive creatures. When a mother pig is ready to have her babies, she finds a quiet spot, builds a nest in the ground, and cares for them until they are ready to move back to the rest of the group.

This is what used to happen, before they were bred as slaves for human consumption and kept in concentration camps. Who is responsible for this assault on nature, on common decency and on life itself? You are. The concentration camps only exist because you pay for them. You could easily put your money somewhere else, but you choose not to.

You are the one who believed it when the meat marketing board told you that a "balanced diet" was not, as you might have expected, the one that your species evolved with, but the one which their clients produce in the concentration camps. For millions of years, humans ate fruit, raw vegetables, and the flesh of an occasional wild animal. And these animals weren't the same ones you now get at the supermarket, either physically or morally.