Hog Hell

I remember the first and only time I'd ever been in a battery piggery - I was in Yorkshire, staying with a nice boy I'd met on holiday and his mum invited me to go for guided walk around the farm. The smell was so appalling and clingy that afterwards I had to shower and put all of the clothes I'd been wearing, into the washing machine.

But the really appalling thing was the size of the pig pens. The pigs were penned up in small groups and even smaller crates. The sows were penned in so tightly they couldn't turn around - I was told this prevented them from accidentally squashing their piglets.

And I smugly assumed that piggies in New Zealand ran wild and free-ish, like our deer, sheep and cattle.

Then I saw some film footage last night on 60 Minutes Sunday, that made me realise how wrong I've been all this time. The pigs in this farm - and apparently it's not unique - were confined one to a crate, and the crates were so small they could not turn around. Some crates looked big enough to allow the pig to lie down in despair, others didn't. Sows lay effectively immobilied for years like big, pink piglet machines.

It was pretty much as bad as the hen batteries I've seen, only worse because pigs are supposed to be even more intelligent than dogs.

It was so upsetting, and this is all legal. I just don't understand why pig farmers aren't subject to the same rules of humane treatment as other livestock in New Zealand.
So, no more pork sausages on the menu. And we will get getting all our bacon from Freedom Farms from now on.

Edited 23 May - Sorry Antoinette, the TV show I saw this on was Sunday, not 60 Minutes (those hour-long current affairs shows all look the same to me). I couldn't find the show on Youtube, but I did find some similar footage - also received by SAFE - from another piggery in New Zealand (about a year old), here's a link to a news story following the screening and here's a piece about it from SAFE.