Mauricio García-Pereira (vegetarian): From Slaughterhouse to Animal Liberation, Part 1 of 2

Mauricio is a brave Spanish whistleblower and author who emigrated to France 20 years ago and worked for 7 years at the Limoges slaughterhouse where he witnessed the abuse of animals, including the slaughter of pregnant cows. No longer able to bear it, he decided to contact the animal protection association L214, and agreed to smuggle a camera into the slaughterhouse and secretly film the atrocities going on inside it. Mauricio testified with his face uncovered. “When I first arrived here in Limoges, I sometimes bought Limousin meat, but I couldn't imagine all the suffering, all the pain, all this manipulation, all this horror. We are in the twenty-first century; we have to evolve, we have to move forward. We don’t need to eat meat. We don’t need to kill animals for food.” “As far as I'm concerned, I stopped eating meat. I am a vegetarian. We can go without meat. It's good for animals, it's good for the planet and therefore it's good for people.” After working at the slaughterhouse for seven years, he became totally disgusted by the brutal practices he saw taking place there. He soon realized that the suffering of animals needed to be exposed and stopped. “I could no longer bear it. I was at my wit's end, and I wanted to denounce their activities, the number of animals per day. Because it is not just a few cows, it's hundreds and hundreds of cows, lambs, pigs of all ages, all sizes, from small, from babies to old sows, and piglets, very tiny ones. There were lambs, sometimes even a few days old.” “I wanted to stop long before seven years. I waited... because I wanted to denounce the practices, and especially the slaughter of pregnant cows. How can someone still kill pregnant cows, every day? How can we kill small calves, mothers with small calves inside? Someone explain this to me. And I wanted to report it after four years, but I didn't know how. So, I waited until the day I discovered the L214 Association on TV. And thank you to the L214 Association. I called them, and I showed them some photos. Then I made videos for them.”