News, views and top stories in your inbox. Don't miss our must-read newsletter Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

As a small, animal-loving child my mum often took me to the local cattle market as a treat.

It was only when I found out why the animals were there and where they were destined for that I refused to ever go again.

I still ate my mum’s roast dinners, liver and bacon and all manner of animal insides and outsides, because that’s what was served up – no alternative offered.

Mum didn’t waste any part of a dead creature, dishing up pigs’ trotters and even pigs’ head in the form of a hideous dish called brawn, all of which I declined to eat, despite her threats.

It was Bob Geldof who finally turned me vegetarian when, in 1986, I read his autobiography Is That It? He writes about his time working in a slaughterhouse, where, he said, the cows awaiting their fate actually screamed and poo-ed themselves in terror.

That image has never left me and it’s why, for over 30 years, I haven’t touched meat, nor products tested on animals.

You only have to go online to see images of the horror we inflict upon the creatures we live side by side with, in the pursuit of their flesh and organs to satisfy our overweeningly greedy demands.

At least 22 million animals are killed for food every single day in the UK – more than a billion a year. Some endure wretched lives in terrible conditions so that we can fuel our fat, insatiable, overblown lifestyles.

On the front page of this paper on Thursday, we carried a horror-strewn expose of the meat industry’s vile exploitation of beautiful pregnant horses.

The poor creatures are kept in awful conditions and impregnated while young so that they produce a serum which is extracted from their jugular veins and injected into pigs in order to promote multiple births.

More pregnancies. More pigs. More bacon. More pork. More profit, of course. Oh, and more suffering.

On Tuesday, I met Sir David Attenborough , a gentle soul whose passion for the dignified wild creatures we share this planet with spills over.

We need them for our survival he said. And he warned that if our rapacious, selfish exploitation of wildlife to fuel our greedy, selfish, polluting lifestyles is allowed to continue, we face not only their destruction, but ours too.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

It’s not a doom-laden fairy tale. And I’m not a rampant, lecturing vegetarian. I’m not keen on people who are. But they’re a damn sight better than human beings who ignorantly torture and kill for profit.

PS: Biggest regret of the week? Being in the warm, wise presence of the living legend that is Sir David and not asking for a picture.

We were at the People’s Postcode Lottery Charity Gala, where he accepted a £250,000 cheque for Flora and Fauna International, a conservation charity he joined 50 years ago.

I didn’t want to sully his dignity with the grasping self-satisfying affront that is a selfie. And now I wish I had.