On December 26 last year, Coles Supermarkets announced that starting with the new year they would henceforth be selling only beef produced without hormone growth promotant (HGP). They said this was to provide their customers with more tender beef. Coles had also made an earlier commitment to phase out sow crates in the production of their pork products. On January 10 this year, thirty-five agricultural and veterinary scientists, most of whom work in areas related to livestock production, published a full-page ad in Australia’s only national general newspaper in which they decried both moves. They claimed that Coles’s initiatives “might…