In the UK, about 760 million animals are slaughtered each year for meat production. What happens in a specialized cage that looks like a comb with metal teeth that will separate the sow from her newborn piglets. She lies on her side, and the metal bars prevent her from touching or licking her offspring. Newborn piglets can only suck milk, no other contact with the mother is possible. Why this ingenious device? In order to prevent the mother from lying down and crushing her offspring, the producers say. Such an incident can occur in the first few days after birth, when the little pigs are still moving too slowly. And the real reason is that farm pigs grow unusually large and can only move clumsily around the cage.
Other farmers say that by using these cages they are taking care of their animals. Of course they care, but only about their bank accounts, because one lost pig is lost profit. After a three or four week feeding period, the piglets are removed from their mother and placed in individual cages one above the other. Under natural conditions, the feeding period would have continued for at least another two months. I have observed how, in more humane conditions, piglets frolicked and ran after each other, tumbled and played and generally mischievous almost like puppies. These farm piglets are kept in such tight quarters that they cannot run away from each other, let alone play. Out of boredom, they begin to bite each other’s tails and sometimes inflict serious wounds. And how do farmers stop it? It’s very simple – they cut piglets’ tails or pull out teeth. It’s cheaper than giving them more free space. Pigs can live up to twenty years or even longer, but these piglets will not live more than 5-6 months, depending on what product they are grown for, to make a pork pie, or sausages, or ham, or bacon. A few weeks before slaughter, the pigs are transferred to fattening pens, which also have little space and no bedding. In the USA, iron cages were widely used in the 1960s, they are very narrow and the piglets can hardly move. This, in turn, prevents energy loss and allows you to gain weight faster. For sows life goes on in its own way. As soon as the piglets are taken away from her, she is tied up and a male is allowed to come to her so that she becomes pregnant again. Under normal circumstances, like most animals, a pig would choose its own mate, but here it has no choice. Then she is again transferred to a cage, where she will bear the next offspring, almost immobilized, for another four months. If you ever see these cages, you will surely notice that some pigs gnaw on metal bars that are right in front of their snout. They do it in a certain way, repeating the same movement. Animals in zoos sometimes do something similar, like roam back and forth in a cage. This behavior is known to be the result of deep stress., the phenomenon was covered in the Pig Welfare Report by a special government-backed research group, and was equated with a nervous breakdown in humans. Pigs that are not kept in cages do not have much more fun. They are usually kept in narrow pens and must also produce as many piglets as possible. Only a negligible proportion of pigs are kept outdoors. Pigs once lived in Great Britain in forests that covered half the area of the country, but in 1525, hunting led to their complete extinction. In 1850, their population was again revived, but in 1905 it was destroyed again. In the forests, pigs ate nuts, roots, and worms. Their shelter was the shade of trees in summer, and huge rookeries built of branches and dry grass in winter. A pregnant pig usually built a rookery about a meter high and had to travel hundreds of miles to find building materials. Watch a sow and you will notice that she is looking for a place to do something. It is an old habit to look for a place for such a nest. And what does she have? No twigs, no straw, nothing. Fortunately, dry stalls for sows have been illegal in the UK since 1998, although most pigs will still live in unbearably cramped conditions, this is still a step forward. But 40% of all meat eaten in the world is pork. Pork is consumed in much larger quantities than any other meat, and it is produced anywhere in the world. Also much of the ham and bacon consumed in the UK is imported from other countries such as Denmark, where many more pigs are kept in dry sow pens. The biggest step people can take to improve the welfare of pigs is to stop eating them! It’s the only thing that will get results. No more pig will be abused. “If young people realized what the process of raising pigs really is, they would never eat meat again.” James Cromwell, The Farmer from The Kid.