Juliet Gellatley is a British writer and animal rights activist. She is the founder and director of Viva! and a former director of the Vegetarian Society. She is also a founding director of The Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation, now known as Viva!Health, along with Tony Wardle, with whom she was married and has two sons, Jazz and Finn, born in 2002. She is the author of The Livewire Guide to Going, Being and Staying Veggie!, The Silent Ark: A Chilling Expose of Meat – The Global Killer, and Born To Be Wild: The Livewire Guide to Saving Animals Gellatley was the winner of the Linda McCartney Award for Animal Welfare in 1999, sponsored by the Daily Mirror'sPride of Britain Awards.
Career
Gellatley became vegetarian at the age of 15 and has spent most of her working life campaigning on behalf of animal rights. After obtaining a degree in zoology and psychology, she became the Vegetarian Society's first youth education officer and rose to become its director. She launched Greenscene, Britain's only magazine for young vegetarians, and was its editor from 1987 to 1992. In October 1994, she launched Viva!, a registered charity that campaigns for vegetarian and vegan lifestyles and promotes animal rights. She was the editor and one of the authors of Vegetarian Issues: A Resource Pack for Secondary Schools, 1992. In 2002, Gellatley co-authored When Pigs Cry: A Report on the USA Pig Industry. Gellatley was one of several people who provided information used in the writing of the book Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism by Mark Hawthorne.
In 1997, Gellatley created a website to campaign against the culling of kangaroos and the trade in their meat. The Australian High Commission in London responded that it was, "a campaign based on false, emotive and outdated information," and that the meat was a by-product of a regulated cull to control the numbers of kangaroos that would take place anyway. In 2002, on the television show 60 Minutes, she talked about the "illegal" killing of kangaroos in Australia, and in 2006 wrote "'Under Fire' A Viva! Report on the Killing of Kangaroos for Meat and Skin." She subsequently took the campaign to Australia itself. Gellatley extended the campaign to the football industry, launching the "Killing for Kicks" campaign. She has named Adidas as a company that uses kangaroo skin to make football boots. Despite continued pressure by campaigners causing some suppliers to drop the product, kangaroo meat continues to be available for sale to consumers in the UK.
