I AM a farmer so please could Mr Daniells (Featherbed farmers, Letters December 3) tell me where I can get a free featherbed as I definitely cannot afford to buy one even if they can still be bought.

How would he feel if his wage fell from £400 a week to actually having to pay a similar amount just to go to work, and all that for a 12-hour day.? That is what has happened to most farmers in the last year.

If you look back to 1984 the sale of 80 of my pigs paid for a new car. Today I need to sell nearly 400 to buy a new car. In 1984 one pig 'bought' about 200 litres of petrol. Today it is about 70.

And pigs have never been subsidised. I have an old Land Rover and my wife has a Rover car, both British. My wife works or otherwise I would be bankrupt already.

F Henley,

Green Farm,

Southfield Lane,

Seaton Ross,

York.

...THIS week a new film called Babe-Pig In The City is released. This film will hopefully make many children realise the truth behind the meat industry.

Battery farmed pigs are denied straw and have no contact with their mothers.

Recently Viva! exposed pig farms in undercover video footage.

Pigs were left to rot in an open pit, dead pigs were left, illegally, strewn in a yard and pigs were shown paralysed in filthy cramped conditions.

All over the country animal campaigners will be handing leaflets out to cinema-goers. Hopefully this will be happening locally. The previous Babe film helped in our campaigns and we are hoping this one will do the same. We will campaign until people wake up to the cruelty and suffering and something is done to stop it.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls would we be so keen to turn a blind eye?

To see highly intelligent creatures crammed into filthy, barren pens where they can barely move and have nothing to do disgusts children, they are horrified.

The children are keen to stop cruelty to animals and to save the pig's bacon.

Hayley Kilmartin,

c/o York Animal aid,

Peacecentre,

Clifford Street,

York.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.