Pig Farming Conditions in the News
The state of animals in farming is a shocking spectacle. Most people are able to live a life of deliberate ignorance and see meat wrapped in plastic or behind the glass of a deli counter and dis-associate it from the misery of the living being that was the meat before the plastic. The horror of animal farming was highlighted in today’s Independent as they were passed photographs from an Animal Aid undercover investigation.
Government vets have launched an investigation into Britain’s pig farming industry after disturbing images showing dead and diseased animals were passed to The Independent.
Pork farmers have been conducting a high-profile advertising campaign to encourage consumers to buy more expensive British produce, claiming that standards are higher than they are on the Continent. But the images, taken at farms linked to leaders of the industry, raise serious concerns about the welfare of the majority of the country’s 8 million pigs.
Vets at the Government’s Animal Health agency, which enforces welfare legislation and conducts regular inspections of farm premises, said it would investigate the findings.
Activists from the welfare group Animal Aid entered 10 farms in March and April. Two of the farms were operated by companies run by members of the industry’s governing body the British Pig Executive (BPEX), while others were linked to other senior figures in the industry.
Animal Aid claimed its investigation showed that farmers were “falling considerably short” of the images it portrayed in its campaigning. Shot in Cornwall, Somerset, Lincolnshire, North and East Yorkshire, the footage shows pigs with sores where they have rubbed against metal bars; farrowing crates that prevent sows from moving; pigs with bite marks; collapsed and convulsing animals; pigs covered in excrement; dirty pens; and routine tail-docking.
remainder of article at the Independent
- More than nine million pigs are slaughtered annually in the UK.
- Around 450,000 sows are currently used for breeding.
- Seventy per cent of British pigmeat comes from animals reared intensively, but even ‘outdoor reared’ and ‘outdoor raised’ pigs spend half or more of their lives indoors.
- Britain’s modest advances in pig welfare have not been made alone, and this country is certainly not in the vanguard. Sweden, for example, banned tethering almost three decades before Britain. And in 1997, Switzerland banned the use of farrowing crates altogether, making nonsense of Britain?s claims that we lead the way. In Sweden, weaning takes place at 5-6 weeks, an improvement on Britain and yet still far short of the17 weeks that pigs suckle and nurse their young in semi-natural conditions. The tethering of sows is now banned across the entire EU. Sow stalls are banned in Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland, as well as Britain. In 2013 they will be illegal across the whole of the EU. In Sweden, all pigs must be provided with straw or other litter material ? something that British pigs are largely denied. And pigs on Swedish farms may be held in a farrowing crate for a maximum of one week. In Britain, it is four weeks. Norway will enforce a ban on the castration of piglets from 2009 ? something which, although only rarely carried out in the UK, has not been outlawed here.
