While animal rights politics was on the rise, linked with wider opposition to the exploitation of nature, this song brought an existing slogan (associated with the Animal Liberation Front) into wider public consciousness, where it has since stayed. Opposition to meat eating is communicated through the sounds of distressed animals and lyrics seeking to effect a rhetorical ‘redescription’, changing the meaning of meat from something harmless (‘the flesh that you so fancifully fry’) to ‘murder’.