February, a burning barn, and a team of firefighters from Dorset and Wiltshire, England, who manage to bring 18 piglets and two sows out alive. Rachel Rivers, the farm manager, promises not to forget the gesture.
Six months and one day later, she keeps her word: she arrives at the station with a package of sausages made from the meat of the same animals the team had saved from the fire. The firefighters, unaware of the uproar to come, celebrate with a barbecue and proudly post it on Facebook.
The reaction is immediate. Animal rights organizations, including PETA, call the gesture cruel and announce that they will send vegetarian sausages as an alternative. The pressure forces the firefighters to delete the post and apologize. Rivers, however, does not back down: in her view, her animals lived six months free and well fed, and death is, she explains, an inevitable part of life on a farm.
