Bacon and ham may excite your taste buds, but I bet they will lose their appeal when you learn that you are feasting on the bodies of pigs that lived lives filled with tremendous suffering.
The vast majority of sows bred to provide piglets for the pork industry are kept in 2-foot wide metal gestation crates for most of their lives. In these crates pigs cannot walk, turn around, or lie down comfortably. On top of this, they are impregnated every 5-6 months and have their babies taken away from them time and again. Like human mothers, mother pigs have very strong maternal instincts. In the wild they make nests and nurse their litters for over three months. In breeding facilities, however, piglets are taken from their mothers after only 17 days so the sow can be re-impregnated as soon as possible. The piglets then undergo castration, ear-notching and tail docking without anesthetics. And then of course, they are all ultimately loaded onto trucks and sent to slaughter. To give you a sense of how pleasant the trip alone is– each year, some 80,000 pigs die in transport on the way to the slaughterhouse. Once at the slaughterhouse, the surviving pigs are prodded onto a narrow walkway where they see the animals ahead of them squeal in horror, have their throats cut, and are hung upside down to bleed out. *
Pigs live a life of confinement, sadness, horror, and chronic physical pain…and more than 120 million pigs endure this and are slaughtered every year in the United States. While visiting Farm Sanctuary, I had the opportunity to visit some of the luckiest pigs in the world who were rescued from this horrific system, and in this video Farm Sanctuary’s National Shelter Director Susie Coston tells the story of the sanctuary’s resident pigs and speaks about the problems with Gestation Crates and the system as a whole.
*The information about pig farming was obtained from the book Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, and Money
