THICK, fleshy, severed cow’s tongues, their tips curled neatly on to the butcher’s tray. Skinned whole rabbits, limbs stretched taut as on a rack, eyes glassy. A moist pink blooded pig’s brain, decorated jauntily with a sprig of parsley. A butcher’s counter in France is a feast for carnivores—and a shop of horrors for the squeamish. Now it has also become the object of a violent anti-meat campaign, which is stirring a resistance movement among the country’s bouchers.

In recent months, a growing number of boucheries, particularly in northern France, have been vandalised or sprayed with fake blood. “Meat is murder”, or “Stop speciesism”, a campaign message designed to halt abuse of one species by another, are the attackers’ signature graffiti. Such has been the concern among butchers that last month they sent a joint letter to Gérard Collomb, the interior minister, to demand better security. On July 3rd a delegation from the French Confederation of Butchers, Pork-Butchers and Caterers (CFBCT), which represents 18,000 butchers across the country, met his team to discuss their safety.

For years, the best a vegetarian could hope to find on the menu of a typical French brasserie was omelette and chips. The French have a higher consumption of beef per person than any other European country. Yet even in France, where a steak-frites is part of the national culinary identity and livestock-rearing the very fabric of rural life, consumption of red meat has been on the decline. Amid concerns about health as well as rising prices, sales of fresh beef have dropped by about a fifth over the past decade, and those of veal by even more.

Vegan restaurants, meanwhile, have sprung up in Paris and edgy bits of other cities, serving raw food, kale and green shakes to végétaliens. Vegan lobby groups argue that a minority of militants do not represent the majority of peaceful consumers and campaigners, whose only aim is to persuade the French that their meat-based culture of gastronomie has got it all wrong. Butchers, though, will not give up without a fight. Jean-François Guihard, head of the CFBCT, laments what he calls the “excessive media coverage of the vegan way of life”. He is “shocked”, he says, by an attempt to “impose on the vast majority a way of life, if not an ideology”.