Finally, in 2009, human beings were weaned from their carnivorous habits, and the world's greatest carnivore finally softened into something resembling what it was originally created to be - a benign, good humored, good natured, naked Ape with big brains and balls

Food celebrities such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall have raised public awareness of the way modern meat is produced. But such campaigns tend to focus on the bland taste, ethical or environmental issues such as the toxic waste produced by factory farming, or the amount of water needed to produce a single kilo of beef (16,000 litres).

SHOOT: The problem is our voracious appetite for meat - in the form of burger hut hamburgers and restaurant steaks.

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk The stress of such vile living conditions makes mass-produced animals more vulnerable to contagion, while the concentration on a few, high-yield breeds has led to genetic erosion and weakened immunity. We have created an environment in which a mild virus can evolve rapidly into a much more pathogenic and contagious form. Six years ago virologists warned that swine flu was on “an evolutionary fast track”. A US Public Health report last year pointed to “substantial evidence of pathogen movement between and among these industrial-scale operations”. A year earlier the UN food agency predicted that the risk of disease transmission from animals to humans would grow with increasingly intensive animal production. With hindsight, it appears that poultry in backyard flocks were markedly more resistant to a virus that has been traced directly to huge factory farms.