02.19.08

Hog Farm Horror

Posted in Veganism, Social Justice, Animal Rights, Farm Investigations at 11:30 pm by Freeman Wicklund

Many people eat pork, bacon, ham or Spam without much thought. But who are these animals whose flesh we eat, and what are their conditions like on the farm? This essay tries to answer these questions.

Pigs are Amazing Animals

Like dogs, pigs are friendly, intelligent, and loyal. Researchers have found that pigs are as intelligent as a three-year-old human child. They are good at video games, have exceptional memories, and complex social relations.

Pigs are actually very clean animals. If given sufficient space, pigs will be careful not to excrete near where they sleep or eat.

Pigs are also very social animal. Researchers have identified the meaning of approximately 20 different grunts, oinks and squeaks that are used in different situations, from wooing their mates to expressing, “I’m hungry!”

Pigs have saved human and nonhuman animals’ lives. Priscilla the pig rescued a boy from drowning. Snort the pig saved her human family from dying of carbon monoxide poisoning in their trailer. Spammy led firefighters to a burning shed to save her calf friend Spot. And Lulu found help for her human companion who had collapsed from a heart attack.

Just like dogs and cats, pig are feeling beings with intelligence, emotional lives, friends and family, and an interests in enjoying life and not being harmed.

The Pork Industry

I lived most of my life in Minnesota, which is the third largest hog farming state in the country – behind Iowa and North Carolina. I saw much of what happens to pigs on modern farms and it isn’t pretty.

Breeding Operations

First, female pigs are forcibly impregnated. Violated with plastic tubes, artificial insemination allows farmers to use sperm from boars whose offspring grow huge quickly. Because the industry is only concerned about breeding animals for quick weight gain, many of the animals develop painful musculoskeletal disorders that result in lameness.

During the sow’s pregnancy, she will live in a gestation crate – an individual coffin-sized metal crate that is only two feet wide. The crates are so small that the animals are unable to turn around or extend their limbs for the duration of their four-month pregnancies. Barely able to move, the pigs develop crippling joint disorders, bruises, open sores, and lameness. Forced to lay in their own wastes they develop ammonia burns and other sores.

Imagine if you were locked into a coffin-sized cage for four months. Unable to move freely, unable to escape, bored out of your mind, laying in your own waste, and developing bed sores, you would probably go crazy, and that is what happens to these curious, intelligent animals. They start to engage in stereotypic behavior; constant, repetitive motions that they will do thousands of times a day. This is a sign they are unable to cope with the situation.

Every year about 35% of breeding sows are sent to slaughter because of health problems or the inability to continue breeding as productively as they had in the past. Another 6% die on the farm.

When a sow becomes lame, she is often taken outside to be killed. During an investigation, I found a dead sow outside of a breeding facility laying in the snow. She had scars all over her body, huge quantities of blood had spilled out of her nose and mouth, which is a sign that she was still alive when left there; as is the fact that the snow had melted around her body. Seeing as she did not get up, it is safe to assume that she was lame. The blood splattered all around her is evidence that she thrashed around for some time before she died – probably from exposure, blood loss or internal injuries.

So given the evidence, one can assume she was a lame pig, who was severely beaten. This may have beenwhat caused her to start bleeding so heavily from her nose and mouth. And the farmers left to die in the freezing Minnesota winter. If something like this was done to a dog or cat, the person who did it would be charged with felony animal cruelty in most states, but it is entirely legal on farms.

When a sow is about to give birth, she will be moved to a farrowing crate. These crates are the same size as the gestation crates, but has a side pen for her babies. In other words, she spends her entire life penned in a cage–a farrowing crate or a gestation crate–where she is unable to move freely.

The industry claims that farrowing crates are necessary to prevent baby pigs from being crushed by their 600 pound mothers. In a natural setting, a mother sow has enough space to get on her front legs’ knees, which signals her young to run away, before she lays down. This is how wild pigs prevent crushing deaths in the wild. But in these crates, she has no room to maneuver herself or her young, and 5% of the piglets will be crushed to death by their confined mother. Another 3% of the piglets will die from diarrhea or starvation.

Mutilations and Separation of Mother from Young

At 1 to 10 days of age, her babies will be subjected to a variety of mutilations without the merciful aid of any painkillers. Their eye-teeth are clipped, their tails are cut and removed, and the males have their testicles cut off.

In a natural setting, a wild pig will have a litter once a year and piglets will wean themselves from their mother in 3 to 4 months. But the industry wants to take the piglets away from the mother as quickly as possible so they can give her drugs to get her back into heat and re-impregnate her as fast as possible. So rather than the allowing the piglets to nurse for the three to four months that they need, the industry separates mother from her young at three to four weeks of age.

Pig Nurseries

The piglets are moved to a “dungeon” that farmers call a nursery where they will live until they are seven weeks old. The runts and those animals not growing fast enough, called “fall-behinds” by the industry, will be killed so they do not waste the farmer’s feed. A common method for killing them is to grab them by a back leg and slam their head face-first into the concrete floor. Farmers call this “thumping.”

Finishing Barns

When the pigs are about 45 pounds or around 7 weeks old, they will be moved to the finishing barns where they are fattened up to 250 pounds by 5 months of age.

Finishing barns are crowded, filthy, and barren. They also can smell horrible. Pigs produce as much waste as three to five humans, and when hundreds or thousands of them are crammed into a warehouse, they create a huge amount of waste. I visited one finishing barn in Minnesota where they stored the manure below the pigs. The smell was so foul, that my friends and I could only spend a few minutes in the shed, and we smelled like the shed for the rest of the day. It was so potent, that in that few minutes time, the smell had coated the back of my throat and I could still taste it when I ate breakfast the next morning.

Thankfully, I could get out of the she shed, but the pigs are forced to breath this foul air in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Pigs noses are so sensitive that they can smell truffles and other items that are buried several feet underground, and yet they are forced to constantly breath in the ammonia-saturated air caused by their own wastes. This air chews up their lungs and results in many of them having pneumonia or other respiratory problems at the time of slaughter. Studies of lungs taken from slaughtered pigs have found that between 30 and 70 percent of pigs have respiratory disease at the time of slaughter.

At another facility, I counldn’t figure out what this mechanical clanking sound I kept hearing was. Then I was looking at a pig and at the same time that her head went down, a puff of dirt rose from the floor, and I heard the noise. I then realized I was hearing pigs sneezing all over the shed. Dozens of them at a time were sneezing all over the shed. Respiratory diseases are responsible for 39% of the deaths of pigs who die before reaching slaughter.

Injury and disease in these confined, dirty, stressful, frustrating facilities is common. Even though pigs are slaughtered at a tender age of 5 months, many of them are unable to survive the conditions and die. We found many pigs heaped on dead piles. And by the shape of some of the animals on those piles, it leads me to wonder about the abuse they suffered while still alive.

Transportation

After reaching a slaughter weight of 250 pounds, the pigs will be loaded up into cattle cars. To get them to move they are often beaten, prodded, or shocked. During the trip they are crowded into cattle cars and forced to travel long distances without food or water and in extremes of heat or cold.

In Gail Eisnitz’s book Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry, she interviews workers in northern climates who have told of pigs arriving frozen to the sides of the trucks. They are winched out with a chain and tractor, and their arm literally rips off.

According to industry reports, more than 1 million pigs die in transport each
year, and an additional 420,000 are crippled by the time they arrive at the
slaughterhouse.

Slaughter

In the larger slaughterhouse operations, a pig is killed every three to four seconds. This does not give much room for error and prevents every pig from being fully unconsciuos before being slaughtered. This means that conscious pigs, still aware of what’s happening, have a knife shoved into their necks, and feel it as the blood flows and they are dunked into the scalding 140 degree Fahrenheit water used to remove their hair.
The rampant cruelty and abuse in slaughterhouses is well documented in Gail Eisnitz’s book Slaughterhouse. In the book she tells of an interview with Ed Van Winkle who, since the 1960s, has worked in the kill floor of 10 different slaughterhouses.

He told Gail that the preferred method for handling a crippled pig was to beat them to death with a lead pipe before the pig gets into the chute. When she asked him how often this happens, he responded, “I’ve beaten eleven to death in one day.”

He goes on to tell her how pigs who were prodded with the electric shockers would have heart attacks, so they would stick a meat hook in their anus to pull them. He said, “You’re dragging these hogs alive, and a lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I’ve seen hams—thighs—completely ripped open. I’ve also seen intestines come out. If the hog collapses near the front of the chute, you shove the meat hook into his cheek and drag him forward.”

The litany of violent and sadistic abuse animals recieve at slaughterhouses goes on and on.

Abuses Widespread

People will try to comfort themselves into believing that this is an isolated incident. But every time any animal protection organization has gone undercover, they find the same routine cruelty and abues. And it happens not just to pigs, but also to chickens, cows, claves, sheep, fish, rabbits and other animals.

The best thing you can do to prevent animal torture, abuse, and neglect at farms and slaughterhouses is to go vegan. To make your transition successful, check out my edge towards veg suggestions.

This text was written in 2007 by Freeman Wicklund of FreemanWicklund.org, and it may be freely reprinted or distributed in any e-zine, e-mail, newsletter or blog as long as this sentence and its Web links are included.

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