I WAS due to be writing about an all-together more pleasant experience with dairy-free cheese this week, but given the amount of vegan vitriol doing the rounds in the past couple of days I'm not sure they deserve the positive publicity (though goodness knows they need it).

After what was - by all accounts - the most successful Veganuary ever, the mood has turned somewhat sour, and a number of militant members have taken to social media to hi-jack the dairy industry's #Februdairy campaign. Dreamt up to showcase the delights of dairy over the course of 28 days, it encourages people to tweet pictures of "cute calves and cheese on crumpets, belligerent bulls and juicy beef burgers". Sounds like a foodie's twitter dreams all come true in one go.

But sadly the campaign has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons - mainly due to the amount of abuse directed at farmers supporting the campaign from vegans high on the success of the previous month.

Farmers who appeared on the Victoria Derbyshire Show last week were branded murderers and rapists by over-zealous vegans, while one particularly unpleasant individual told Oxfordshire-based independent livestock sustainability consultant Dr Jude Capper that fighting breast cancer was karma's way of getting her back for her involvement in the industry. There were even some comparing themselves to the Suffragettes and the French Resistance. I mean, really?

I do appreciate these individuals are the minority, but these people are an absolute PR disaster for veganism, and so long as this approach of trolling and self-righteousness prevails, they don't stand a hope in hell of ever appealing to the masses and becoming a credible lifestyle choice.

And that is coming from someone (me) sympathetic to the principles of veganism.

A press release from Vegan Society HQ even dropped into my inbox last week calling on vegans to stop making death threats to farmers. Surely that goes without saying?

Janet Street-Porter hit the nail on the head last week in her column in The Independent when she pointed out that vegans hurt their cause by being too extreme.

So there I was over the course of the weekend, once again pondering the evils of social media and failing to understand why people cannot accept that everyone is different and celebrate that instead of making sure they shout louder to further their own beliefs, when I came upon a very happy sight in the supermarket.

There, on the shelf, summed up exactly what the #Februdairy campaign is all about - great, diverse, dairy produce, right on our doorsteps.

Lined up in a row were some of the West Country's finest well-known cheeses, Quicke's Double Devonshire, Trevarrian Cornish Camembert, Cotswold Brie and Lubborn Creamery Somerset Camembert.

As a pick-me-up I took home a pack of delicious Double Devonshire, which was promptly devoured by the family on Saturday, while the three varieties of vegan cheese I had also put on the board prompted a lot of screwed up noses and mutterings.

Something about an image problem?