On 20/05/2023, at around 19:30, 7 supporters of Animal Rising entered ‘Cail Bruich’, a Michelin-Star Restaurant in Glasgow that refuses to cater for vegans.
5 individuals have been arrested and taken into police custody as a result of the action.
The smartly-dressed protesters occupied tables reserved for customers of the high-end venue that serves a Saturday menu starting at £140 per person.
Other luxury restaurants in Southampton, Bristol, Birmingham, Lancaster, and London have also been the location of “sit-ins” by supporters of Animal Rising this evening.
Yesterday, 30 people from the group sat down with the roughly 1,000 calves separated from their mothers and kept in small pens at an intensive dairy facility in Dorset that supplies Marks & Spencers [1].
A Michelin-Star Restaurant in Glasgow, ‘Cali Bruich’ has been disrupted by 7 supporters of Animal Rising this evening. The high-end restaurant serves dinners on a Saturday starting at a price of £140 per person. The venue’s meat-heavy example menu includes month-old pigeon, pigs, squid, and caviar.
Smartly-dressed supporters of Animal Rising have been photographed occupying tables reserved for customers and holding placards showing conditions inside UK farms alongside alternative imagined futures of a world free-from animal farming.
One of those taking part, Marshall, 25, said:
"How we currently treat intelligent, feeling animals and our beautiful countryside is not reflective of who we want to be as a society. We can have a safe, secure food system that feeds everyone without the need to harm animals or devastate nature.
We can do so much better than places like Cali Bruich that serve excessively expensive meals and refuse to cater for vegans in the midst of our cost of living and environmental crises.
Supporting farmers to transition to a plant-based food system would allow us to return a significant amount of land to nature, enabling tree-planting, carbon drawdown, and for our threatened biodiversity to thrive. It would also save the lives of a billion animals each year in the UK alone."
A 2022 survey of Scottish grazing/pasture farmers found 64% would be willing to move away from farming animals entirely to enable rewilding if provided appropriate financial support [2]
This Glasgow action mirrors similar high-end restaurant sit-ins happening this evening in multiple cities across the UK, including Salt Bae’s flagship London restaurant that serves steak coated in gold costing upwards of £700 each.
The day before, on Friday 19th May, 30 supporters from Animal Rising visited and sat down alongside the 1,000 calves penned in at a farm in Dorset as part of a protest action. One of the placards held by the group at the restaurant shows a picture taken from that protest.
Animal Rising is a social movement to create a new relationship with all beings and give us a chance for a safe ecological future. The group primarily calls for the transition to a safe and secure plant-based food system, alongside a mass rewilding programme.