Barclays buildings lit up with shocking footage exposing bank’s funding of animal cruelty

The projections, which appeared on branches in Canary Wharf, Borough High Street, Shoreditch and Barclays Tower, were organised by World Animal Protection with the team made infamous by their Led By Donkeys projections and satirist Jolyon Rubinstein. They were kept under wraps until now.

The stunt was designed to highlight Barclays’ role in financing industrial animal cruelty. The bank has invested £5 billion in JBS between 2015 and 2022, which is more than any other financial institution globally.

The projected footage showed the scale of the suffering behind these investments. Chickens crammed into sheds with less space than an A4 piece of paper. Pigs in filthy conditions, mutilated without pain relief. Cows forced to stand in their own waste. These are the realities of JBS’s factory farms and Barclays is funding this cruelty by investing in them.

The footage also exposed the environmental cost. JBS has been repeatedly linked to deforestation in the Amazon, where vast areas of rainforest are burned to make room for cattle or to grow soy for animal feed.

Lindsay Duncan, UK Farming Campaign Manager at World Animal Protection, said:

Barclays is using the hard-earned money of customers to invest in the suffering of billions of sentient farmed animals. It is the biggest global funder of brutal global meat producer, JBS. Yet, Barclays stays silent on these scandalous investments. You can’t see it on its glossy brochures or on its website. Our projection speaks up for animals and urges Barclays to stop funding animal cruelty and to stop investing in JBS.

Barclays earned an estimated £1.3 billion in profit from its investments in JBS between 2018 and 2023. That’s roughly one animal forced to suffer on a factory farm for every pound invested.