Turn on the radio or television, and you will hear the same comforting word – heatwave. It implies something temporary – a visitor that will, in time, leave. It conjures up paddling pools and melting ice cream. It obscures what is actually happening.
This is not a heatwave. This is the climate emergency – already here, already worsening, already killing. The word ‘heatwave’ is doing exactly the work it was designed to do – keeping us emotionally comfortable and cognitively distracted.
The climate emergency is the accelerating destabilisation of Earth’s systems, driven overwhelmingly by fossil fuels and animal agriculture, which together have raised global temperatures by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Last week, the UK Met Office issued only its second-ever red extreme heat warning, with temperatures exceeding 38°C across England and Wales and humidity levels unprecedented in British history. The consequences are wildfire risk, failing infrastructure, hospitals under strain. And then there is the silent, unreported suffering of millions of animals, for whom there is no emergency broadcast and no paddling pool.
And here is the cruelty within the cruelty – animal agriculture, the system that breeds, confines and slaughters tens of billions of animals each year is itself one of the primary engines of the emergency now killing them. It contributes at least 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, drives deforestation at a planetary scale, and degrades the ecosystems on which all life depends. The animals being cooked alive in sheds and lorries this week are the direct victims of an emergency their own exploitation helped to create.
The Chickens
Somewhere in Britain right now, in a vast, windowless shed, a chicken is panting. She cannot sweat. Chickens rely entirely on panting to cool themselves, but panting increases the metabolic rate, generating more internal heat at the very moment the body is trying to shed it. Her temperature rises. She becomes immobile. Her organs begin to fail.
In a factory farm, where the overwhelming majority of the one billion-plus chickens raised for meat in the UK are kept, she has nowhere to go. She is one of tens of thousands packed into a shed, each bird allocated less space than an A4 sheet of paper. The ammonia from their accumulated waste, already causing hock burns and respiratory disease in normal conditions, intensifies in the heat, burning lungs that are already labouring. These are broiler chickens, selectively bred to reach slaughter weight in around 35 days – bodies so structurally compromised from birth that their hearts and lungs are undersized relative to their bulk. The industry created that vulnerability, and today’s abnormally high temperatures are proving fatal.
World Animal Protection has warned that over 1.5 million chickens could be at risk daily on UK factory farms in conditions like last week. During the 2022 UK heatwave, tens of thousands died in sheds operated by companies supplying Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Whistleblowers described the “sheer scale and stink” of the dead birds. The industry called it “freak weather.” It was not freak weather. It was the future, arriving early.
Animals in Transit
I have stood at the side of a slaughterhouse and watched the lorries pull in. Cattle trucks and pig wagons – the kind you can smell before you see, where hooves and snouts press through the slats. On a hot day, the heat comes off those trailers like a radiator.
In the summer of 2025, the UK’s hottest on record, Carbon Brief analysis of Food Standards Agency data revealed nearly 6,600 animals died from heat stress en route to slaughterhouses in England and Wales between June and August, double the number of summer 2024.
Pigs are what I keep coming back to. A pig’s mind is not simple. Researchers have documented their capacity for deception, play, and recognising their own reflection. They form bonds and grieve their dead. On the road to slaughter in a British June, packed tight into a metal container with no functional sweat glands, a pig pants instead, but panting has a high metabolic cost that accelerates the crisis it’s trying to resolve. Carbon Brief’s documentation of transit deaths includes incidents so shattering they stop you cold – after death from overheating, dead pigs’ carcasses are ravaged by the surviving pigs in the lorry. That is not cruelty on the animals’ part – it’s the result of the psychological damage done when pigs are inflicted with extreme suffering. It’s raw panic.
Dolphins Held in Captivity
I have been inside a dolphinarium. I stood at the glass and watched a bottlenose dolphin swim the same oval circuit, again and again. The pool was perhaps 30 metres long and four metres deep. The dolphin’s open-ocean range is measured in hundreds of kilometres. The gap between those two numbers is not a welfare shortfall. It is a moral chasm.
In the wild, a bottlenose dolphin may travel 100 kilometres in a single day, navigating by echolocation through ocean depths of hundreds of metres, living in shifting social groups spanning hundreds of individuals. In the approximately 60 dolphinariums still operating across Europe, she has none of this. She has a pool in which her echolocation clicks bounce back off concrete walls in a constant, disorienting cacophony. She cannot dive, roam, or choose her companions. She performs the same tricks, to the same blaring music, for the same clapping crowds. And worryingly, the shallow pool – unlike the deep ocean, which holds its temperature at depth – absorbs the heat of record-breaking summers.
Dolphinariums depend entirely on artificial infrastructure to survive hot climates, and if cooling systems shut down or become degraded, the pool water can rapidly warm up, causing life-threatening heat stress. Furthermore, dolphins in outdoor tanks face continuous exposure to direct solar radiation without the ability to dive into deep, naturally cool ocean currents to escape the heat, leading to sunburns and eye damage.
The Beagles of MBR Acres
In Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, inside windowless industrial sheds, over 1,000 beagles are living out their brief lives in conditions that most people, if shown them, would refuse to believe were legal.
MBR Acres, owned by the American company Marshall BioResources, breeds more than 2,000 beagles a year and sells them at around 16 weeks old to UK laboratories for toxicology testing. They live under 12 hours of artificial light and 12 hours of darkness. They never go outside. They have never felt grass, or rain, or sunlight. This week, with Cambridgeshire recording temperatures exceeding 30°C for five consecutive days, that architecture of confinement has become potentially lethal. There are no windows to open, no means of escape from heat that can push dogs from distress to organ failure in a matter of hours.
I have stood at Camp Beagle while vans turned into the facility and the gates swallowed them. You cannot see inside. That is the point. The beagles are in there, in the industrial darkness, and the people with their placards are the only witnesses they have – arrested, injuncted, and now further constrained by the government’s 2026 changes to protest law. They stand outside a building full of dogs who do not know they exist, while the rest of the country buys fans to cope with a climate emergency it still prefers to call a heatwave.
The Complicity We Call Normal
Everything described here is not a crisis of management or regulation. It is not a welfare problem waiting to be fixed by better ventilation or cooler lorries. These are symptoms. The disease is the system itself – the total, legally-sanctioned, culturally-normalised domination of other species for human ends. The only honest response is not to reform it. It is to end it.
Every industry that exploits animals will tell you it can be made better – more humane, more sustainable, higher welfare. These are the words of an institution that has learned to speak the language of public sentiment without changing its practices. A pig killed at six months who lived well is still a pig killed at six months. The question is not how we do these things. The question is whether we should be doing them at all. Animal agriculture accounts for at least 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the transport sector. It is the leading cause of deforestation, the largest consumer of fresh water, the primary driver of biodiversity collapse. And then there is the moral consideration – how have we normalised harm?
The animals dying in this heat are not collateral damage in an unfortunate natural event. They are the direct victims of a human-invented system centred on their global exploitation. That irony is not poetic. It is a catastrophe in real time. And the only meaningful response to a catastrophe is not to manage it better. It is to stop causing it.
Footnote:
Ryder was a 26-year-old Standardbred gelding who spent his life trapped in the brutal reality of New York City’s carriage industry. His existence was defined by hard labour, exhaust fumes, and concrete. He was worked well into his old age, his owners having falsified his date of birth.
He was neglected, systematically malnourished, and forced to pull heavy loads while suffering from a debilitating neurological disease. It all culminated on a scorching August afternoon in 2022 when his exhausted body collapsed onto the boiling Manhattan asphalt. He was met not with mercy, but with blows and desperation from a driver trying to force him back to work.
Ryder did not survive the industry that exploited him – he was euthanised just two months later. His life was undeniably painful and unfair.
In 2025 Ryder’s enslaver (owner), Ian McKeever, was found not guilty of overdriving his horse.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
