JENNY MCQUEEN: ‘Reading about the injustices meted out to food animals turned me into a vegan and then an animal rights activist. This was the 1990s, before I’d even met any farmed animals… For a city girl, I’ve had a lot of experience with pigs. I’ve visited with them in sanctuaries, given belly rubs (they love those), introduced little children to them, rescued and cared for young piglets, witnessed distressed, overheated, freezing, and/or thirsty young pigs in slaughter trucks, and experienced the hellish conditions inside a pig breeding and pig growing facility.
So what’s the truth about how pigs live on farms?… The industry provides an adorable illustration of “This Little Piggy” in a sweet-looking children’s booklet… The reality, however, is quite different. This is from my direct experience, in Canada, a developed country. From the outside, there are neat buildings, a clean white shed, surrounded by pristine fields. Workers park their cars and leave civilization to enter a secret world of suffering and injustice to their charges—hundreds, perhaps thousands of pigs. Their offices and kitchen area look like any workplace. Open the door to the pigs’ area and your senses and emotions are assaulted…
One could argue that the female pigs kept for breeding have it the worst. They languish in either a cramped gestation or farrowing crate, where they can’t turn around. They urinate and defecate in the crate, and as they have to stand in their feces, it gradually falls below the slatted floor to a big pit. They give birth on these cold hard floors, not able to nuzzle their young or create a nest as they do in the wild. If they suffer injuries, there’s no vet on hand… Females are forced to reproduce until their piglet production declines, and then they are brutally loaded and shipped off to slaughter. Male pigs are mostly slaughtered young, at barely 6 months old’. SOURCE…
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