A campaign by British vegans to outlaw new, plastic bank notes which were partly made from cows has failed.
Activists lobbied the Bank of England over their new, plastic £5 after it admitted that they contain trace amounts of tallow – a product made from animal fat.
Some shops and restaurants vowed not to accept the bills – which feature a portrait of Winston Churchill.
Inevitably, a petition was started, and garnered around 130,000 signatures on Change.org.
Despite meetings with Bank of England executives, the crusade lost traction, and was buried this week by an official statement.
Indeed, campaigners are likely to be frustrated even further, as the bank confirmed the same process will also be used for the forthcoming £10 note, due this September.
A spokesman said: “After careful consideration the Bank has concluded that the severity of the combined impact of the factors outlined outweigh potential harm caused.”
They justified the call by saying that the cost of reprinting hundreds of millions of notes, as well as the logistical challenge of removing the existing ones, was not worth the prize of assuaging protesters’ concerns.
Outrage over the use of cow derivatives in the notes was severely dented after a Vice article which attempted to calculate how many cows would die to create the notes.
Mathematical analysis of the quantities involved revealed that the amount of tallow used is vanishingly small – concluding that the tallow for all 329 million £5 notes could be sourced from half of one cow.
However, the efforts of the bank notes’ opponents may not be entirely in vain – officials are considering using palm oil instead of tallow for revamping the £20 note, which is due to be replaced in 2020.