06/09/2026
While we go through all of your comments and messages, I feel like this is the right time for this post. Over the last few weeks we've asked for your views on slaughter, animal welfare and what you think needs to change. We've had some incredibly honest responses, including from people who have stopped eating meat altogether because they couldn't reconcile themselves with parts of the current system.
We've asked for your views. Now here are ours.
I've written this post more times than I can remember. I've made it harder hitting, I've softened it, deleted bits and started again. It's a difficult subject and I completely understand that some people won't want to talk about it. But Julie and I both feel very strongly that we need to.
We hear the phrase FIELD TO FORK constantly when we talk about food. But have you ever stopped and thought about how that story is actually told?
Let's start with the FIELD.
It's a wonderful story to tell. Pigs outside with muddy noses, cattle grazing on hillsides, sheep spread across a Highland glen. And those farms are real. There are farmers and crofters doing an incredible job producing livestock outdoors, putting an enormous amount of time, care and dedication into their animals, often for very little financial return. For most of the people we know it isn't simply a business, it's a way of life.
But those genuine outdoor farms also provide much of the imagery through which we think about farming as a whole. An outdoor pig makes a fantastic photograph. It helps create the picture many of us have in our heads when we hear words like British, local, farm assured or high welfare.
The problem is that the pig behind the packet in your hand may never have stood in a field at all.
Now, let's be fair here. That doesn't automatically mean it has been badly treated.
A well-managed indoor system can provide good nutrition, veterinary care, bedding, enrichment, stable social groups and protection from the weather. Recognised higher-welfare schemes can go considerably beyond the basic legal requirements. Equally, putting a pig outside doesn't magically guarantee good welfare. Outdoor animals still need good husbandry, shelter, food, water, health care and someone who knows what they're doing.
So we're not going to tell you that every indoor farmer is bad or that every outdoor farmer is wonderful. Neither would be true.
Instead, we've asked ourselves a different question.
If we're prepared to take an animal's life to feed ourselves, what do we owe that animal in exchange?
That's where Julie and I have drawn our own line.
For us, simply avoiding unnecessary suffering isn't quite enough. We want the animal to have had the opportunity to actually live as that animal.
A pig is intelligent, social and incredibly inquisitive. Given the opportunity it roots, forages, explores, wallows, chooses where it wants to lie and spends an enormous amount of time investigating the world around it. We can provide enrichment inside a building to give it opportunities to express some of those behaviours, and that's certainly better than not doing it.
But for us, it isn't the same as giving that animal the world outside.
You sometimes hear the argument, "Well, they don't know any different."
Maybe they don't. But we do.
There's an old saying, fair exchange is no robbery, and that's increasingly how we think about producing meat. At the end of this process we're going to take everything from that animal. Its life will feed us and our families.
That's an enormous thing to take.
So our side of that exchange is to give it a life worth living first. Sunshine and rain, mud and grass, space to explore and the opportunity to behave like the animal it was born to be. Then, when the time eventually comes, we owe it the fairest and kindest death we can reasonably give it.
That's our line. Other people will draw theirs somewhere else, and that's okay.
But if we're going to take the life at the end without really allowing the animal to live it first, then for us, fair exchange has become robbery.
That's the FIELD.
Then we have the FORK. That's the easy bit to sell. Beautiful steaks, sausages sizzling in a pan, Sunday roasts and meat boxes neatly packed for the freezer. We all need to eat, so nobody has much trouble talking about the fork.
But somewhere between those two we've become remarkably quiet about one very small word.
TO.
The animal doesn't magically disappear from a field and reappear neatly labelled in a packet.
Loading, transport, unloading, handling, lairage, stunning, slaughter, hanging, butchery and processing all happen in between.
That's the TO.
And from an animal-welfare point of view, some of the most important moments of that animal's entire life happen within that little word.
Pigs are perhaps the clearest example.
Back in 2003, the Farm Animal Welfare Council examined high-concentration CO₂ stunning of pigs and recommended that the method should be phased out within five years because of the welfare concerns surrounding it.
More than twenty years later, the UK's Animal Welfare Committee looked at it again.
Its 2025 assessment concluded that conscious pigs exposed to high concentrations of CO₂ experience pain, respiratory distress and fear before losing consciousness. It again recommended that high-concentration CO₂ stunning should be prohibited, with the transition to alternatives taking no longer than five years.
Yet today, around 90% of pigs in the relevant UK slaughter data are stunned using high-concentration CO₂.
It's worth putting those facts beside each other.
In 2003, the recommendation was to phase it out.
More than 20 years later, around 90% are being stunned that way.
In fact, rather than disappearing, its use increased. Government reviews record high-concentration CO₂ stunning at just over 50% in 2013, around 86% by 2018, and around 90% in the latest evidence.
Why?
This is where the discussion needs some balance too.
CO₂ systems do have welfare advantages in other parts of the process. Pigs can remain in groups rather than being individually separated and restrained, which can reduce handling stress. Electrical stunning isn't perfect either. It requires good handling, correct equipment, competent operators and a correctly applied stun.
But there is another side to why CO₂ became so widespread.
The Animal Welfare Committee records that these systems enabled faster line and processing speeds and improved meat quality, and that these operational and product-quality advantages helped drive their widespread adoption.
That's where we start asking questions.
Businesses have to function. Throughput matters. Labour matters. Efficiency matters. Meat quality matters. Cost matters. Profit matters. Pretending those pressures don't exist would be ridiculous.
But welfare matters too.
So what happens when they conflict?
If we've known since 2003 that a method presents serious welfare concerns, but more than two decades later its use has increased to around 90%, then I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask where animal welfare actually sits when it comes up against the economics of processing animals at enormous scale.
We're not asking you to accept our answer.
We're asking people to know enough to decide their own.
Maybe I see this differently because death has never really been hidden from me. I've processed animals since I was a boy, from rabbits and deer through to turkeys, ducks, pigs, sheep and cattle. I've also had to end the lives of my own animals, including dogs and cats that I've loved and shared my life with.
Those moments aren't easy. They bring tears and I hope they always will. But when the time comes, I want to be there and I want to be the one to do it. Not because I'm being paid to do it, not because I enjoy it and not because I've become hardened to death. I do it because I love that animal enough to do it.
I've seen first-hand what happens when a kill goes wrong. It's not nice and it's something you don't forget. If an animal has trusted me with its life, then when that time comes I want to know myself that everything reasonably possible was done to make that final moment calm, quick and kind.
I know that's not for everyone and I don't expect it to be.
We've spoken to people through this discussion who have become vegetarian or vegan because of animal welfare. We've spoken to people who have stopped eating meat because they simply couldn't accept parts of what happens between the farm and their plate.
I respect that.
They've looked at the reality, decided where their own line is and made an informed choice.
For us, knowing is better than turning a blind eye.
Our idea of the best possible ending for an animal is actually incredibly simple. At home, somewhere familiar, without being loaded onto a lorry or taken on a journey. Head in a bucket happily eating its breakfast, completely unaware of what's about to happen, and then nothing.
It never knows.
Under the current system we can't simply do that for animals whose meat we're going to sell. We believe there should be a properly regulated route, with the necessary controls, inspection and oversight, that allows more animals to have that kind of ending.
That's a change we want to fight for.
Until then, we make the best choices available to us. And this is where we also want to give credit where it's due.
We use Munro's in Dingwall for livestock that goes through them. The crofters' pigs we work with that go through Munro's are electrically stunned rather than going through a high-concentration CO₂ system. I know the slaughterman, we work with the same vet and we know what happens to those animals when they leave the croft.
That matters enormously to Julie and me.
We're not anti-abattoir. Quite the opposite. Places like Munro's are incredibly important to local food. When somebody is doing something we believe is better for welfare, we should be every bit as willing to talk about that as we are to challenge the things we don't agree with.
And that brings us to Valhalla.
We don't currently rear the livestock behind the meat we sell ourselves, so knowing where it came from matters even more to us.
We go and meet the crofter. We see where the animals live. We spend time learning about them and how they've been reared. We know where they're going for slaughter and how that slaughter happens. Then we process the meat ourselves.
We want to know the FIELD.
We want to know the TO.
And obviously we know the FORK, because we're the ones putting it in the pack.
That's why we're introducing the Valhalla Outdoor Promise, and we're putting that promise directly on our packs.
It isn't a vague claim of "high welfare". It isn't simply "British". And it isn't even simply "local".
It means something specific:
This animal lived outdoors throughout its life.
That's our promise and that's where we've chosen to draw our line.
But the Outdoor Promise is also part of something bigger for us. We want to talk openly about the TO as well. You shouldn't have to wonder what happened to the animal between leaving the croft and arriving in the packet in your hand.
Maybe knowing the answer changes absolutely nothing about what you eat. Maybe you choose differently. Maybe you eat less meat. Maybe you decide eating meat isn't for you at all. Those are your choices, not ours.
What matters to us is that you have enough information to actually make them.
We don't think death should be sensationalised or glorified. We don't think graphic slaughter footage needs to be pushed in people's faces. But neither do we believe death should be carefully edited out of the story of producing meat.
For me, life is part of death just as death is part of life. If we're going to take an animal's life to feed ourselves, then we owe it something in exchange.
For us, that means a life worth living and the best death we can reasonably give it.
Other people may draw their line somewhere else. That's fine. But at least let's give people enough information to know where that line is.
That's what FIELD TO FORK should mean.
Celebrate the FIELD. Enjoy the FORK.
But don't pretend nothing happened between them.
We need to talk about the TO.
Grow slow, eat well.
