IT may be a blessing in disguise that the mad cow disease scare shocks and deters people from meat-eating and veers them to vegetarian diets - when we see news pictures of penned and crated farm animals, with doleful eyes, destined for slaughter as perhaps they sense their pending doom.

The Pope proclaimed in 1990 that animals, too, have souls.

Factory farms and butchery trades decline even as they introduce meat from kangaroos, the ostrich and frogs. What next? Dogs from China?

Even so, the stores offer non-flesh foods as the humanitarian pupils of today become the vegetarian family of the future.

J A MARSDEN, Scarborough Road, Blackburn.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.