The animal rights activist and former actress Brigitte Bardot has appealed to Egypt to avert the planned slaughter of the country's pigs, which has been ordered to reduce the effects of a swine flu pandemic.

In a letter to President Mubarak, the former Fifties icon described the decision to cull an estimated 300,000 pigs on a public health pretext as "cowardly".

Egypt's pig population belongs to and is eaten by members of the Coptic Christian minority. The animals are reared in Cairo slums by Christian rubbish collectors, who feed them the organic waste and food scraps they collect on their rounds.

The Government announced on Wednesday that the herds were to be culled to reduce the risk of a major swine flu outbreak in Egypt - prompting immediate protests from the pig farmers, who threw rocks at health officials as they arrived to start the extermination.

Yesterday, faced with criticism from health experts - who pointed out that pigs do not carry the virus in question - and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, officials changed tack and said that the cull was more a general health measure than a specific reaction to swine flu. They promised that cleaner, larger pig farms would be established outside population centres.

In her letter to Mr Mubarak, Ms Bardot wrote: “Taking advantage of the global hysteria over the propagation of ’Mexican’ flu, which has nothing to do with animals, in order to launch a campaign to exterminate pigs raised by a destitute section of the population is extremely cowardly."

She also urged the authorities not to proceed with their stated intention to set up what one agriculture ministry official called “new farms in special areas, like in Europe."

Ms Bardot called such facilities “horrific and shameful". “To want to kill all these animals and then later establish intensive piggeries where they will be packed tightly together and badly treated is unacceptable,” she wrote, urging Mr Mubarak to prevent the swine slaugher.

Amin Abaza, the Agriculture Minister Amin, said the mass slaughter would begin in earnest on Saturday.

“It will take three weeks to a month, they’ll kill them in specialised slaughterhouses after they’ve been checked for swine flu,” he said.

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