The French federation of butchers wrote to the interior minister saying shops had been sprinkled with fake blood and graffitied and claiming that a growing media focus on veganism was threatening their safety.

The letter said France’s 18,000 butchers were worried about the consequences of “excessive media hype around vegan lifestyles”, and that vegans wanted to “impose their lifestyle on the immense majority of people”.

“We count on your services and on the support of the entire government so that the physical, verbal and moral violence stops as soon as possible,” the federation wrote.

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.

Shop daubed with “milk is rape”

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 cheese maker 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.

He told French media that while meat sales were going down, it was not the 5% of vegetarians in France that threatened butchers’ livelihoods but the 50% of people who were considering cutting down on meat.

Sceptics

Some have suggested butchers are seeking to generate publicity on the back of a small number of incidents.

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.”

Faced with declining meat sales, farmers’ groups have effectively lobbied the centrist government of Emmanuel Macron in recent weeks to prevent “anti-meat” measures.

A proposal to require schools to provide a vegetarian meal at least once a week was dropped in parliament, while food producers have also battled to ban the use of the terms “steak”, “fillet”, “bacon” and “sausage” to refer non-meat products.

By Angelique Chrisafis