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Bloody hell, what a picture!

A religious festival hundreds of miles away provided Edinburgh Evening News readers with shocking pictures of animal slaughter.

The paper carried a Page 1 shot of children watching cattle having their throats slit without anaesthetic in a blood-soaked farmyard. Inside, reporter Chris Marks told of animal welfare groups’ claims that animals from the Lothians were being shipped to France to be horribly butchered for the Muslim Eid-el-Kabir festival.

The Page 1 picture was captioned: How Scottish livestock ends up in a French village’s brutal festival of blood”. Most of Page 3 was taken out by Marks’ report, headed “The journey to a certain and sickening death”, and colour pictures of sheep being held down and slaughtered.

The report quoted an Edinburgh-based pressure group, Advocates for Animals – which supplied the pictures – describing how members of the public hacked with blunt knives at the throats of unaesthetised animals and left them to bleed to death in fields on the outskirts of Paris.

Evening News editor John McLellan said that what appealed to him about the picture used on Page 1 was the scene of people milling about unperturbed by “this great swathe of red” in the foreground.

“I felt that the pictures of the animals actually being slaughtered was probably a little bit too graphic for the front page but if we could tee it up a bit on the front, using something visual, and reveal the full extent of the horror inside, that would be a better way to treat it.

“The concept of the Evening News Page 3 is to do something that’s different and a bit unexpected and often you can get good Page 1 teasers out of what you are doing on Page 3. The strength of what we do on Page 3 really does rely on illustrations. It tends to be a bit softer and more offbeat page but when we get a good, hard topic like this, we will use Page 3 to project it.”

He said he was expecting a good response from readers. “Edinburgh has a lot of environmentally-conscious people and we have a good reputation for highlighting animal issues.”

The photograph above is reproduced courtesy of The Foundation Brigitte Bardot.

From February 21, Advocates for Animals will have a website at www.advocatesforanimals.org

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