Last month the Guardian reported:

Butchers in France have asked the government for police protection from animal rights activists, claiming their security was being threatened and that vegans were trying to impose a meat-free lifestyle on the nation. …

Seven butcher shops were vandalised and sprayed with fake blood in the Hauts-de-France region in the north of the country in April. Other incidents were reported in southern France.

A butcher and a fishmonger in the north had seen windows broken, with the slogan “Stop speciesism” left behind in spray-paint by the vandals.

It is not only purveyors of meat who have faced the wrath of the animal rights activists: last year a cheesemonger in Lyon said his shop was painted with the words “milk is rape” and “milk is murder”.

In March, a vegan cheesemaker was given a seven-month suspended jail sentence for condoning terrorism after she said on Facebook that she had no compassion for the supermarket butcher killed in a terrorist attack on a store in Trèbes and likened being a butcher to being a murderer.

“We condemn all violence,” said Sébastien Arsac of the non-violent L214 campaign group against animal exploitation, which has recently made high-profile films of practises in French abattoirs. …

Jean-François Guihard, a Brittany butcher and the head of the butchers’ federation, said he was not not asking for a police officer to be stationed outside each butcher shop but said the state must monitor what he called “extremist” vegan groups.

Asked by Le Parisien newspaper if he was against all vegetarians, Guihard said: “Not at all. If they refuse to eat meat, that’s their choice. We just want people to respect our craft and our customers, which means the majority of French people. Vegans are in a small minority.”