Imagine pulling out someones teeth with pliers. Or letting them drown in scalding hot water. Or forcing them to give birth in tiny gestation cages where they can't even turn around.
This is what is happening to pigs everyday (among other animals).
Pigs have the potential to have the mental capacity of a three year old, are clean gentle animals and without sounding trite, have feelings. I ♥ animals and in particular pigs so, so much and even though I am not a vegetarian, my efforts to ensure I eat free range, organic meat makes me feel like I am playing a small part to cut out factory farming. I know farmers livelihoods are at stake and production levels may be affected, though this is a question of cruelty and barbaric practices that defies ethics. There is no Darwinism argument to this issue; I believe pasture reared animals are happy animals and if taken care correctly, do not need to suffer as they do.
Here's an extract from UK's The Times, dated 30th January 2009:
As a nation, we are famously sentimental about animals. So why is it so hard to switch on the British consumer's compassion gland when it comes to meat? Even celebrity chefs can't do it. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall admitted this week that his campaign against factory farming of chickens has fallen victim to the credit crunch: organic chicken sales have collapsed. “Free range” - you have to use inverted commas for this phrase, because the reality often does not match those happy words - is up a bit, but cheap chicken still dominates the market. The £2 birds that made Fearnley-Whittingstall cry on TV a year ago were selling in Tesco and Asda recently for just £1.75.
Four out of five meat chickens sold are intensively reared. It's important to be clear what “intensive” means: chicks packed in pens so tightly that their legs do not develop properly; their waste not cleared until the end of their 40-day lifespans. Last night Jamie Oliver said that he thought pigs were treated even worse than chickens. He told me that most European sows are kept in cages too small for them to turn around in for their entire breeding lives. Male pigs are castrated without anaesthetic. Sixty per cent of our bacon is produced in Europe, but it is not easy to deduce that from a label: Oliver showed packs of supermarket bacon that proclaimed “sourced in the UK” and “Wiltshire cure”, but, on inspection of the small print, proved to be from EU-raised meat. - Alex Renton
Money definitely is a factor for many consumers, as they do not see the horrible realities of factory farming. What if heightened educated did exist though and meat-eaters were forced to see how animals were being treated, would that make a difference ? It did with me. The next time you eat meat based goods, I implore you to think about what some living thing went through to give you that product. Happy, ground-digging piggie, or sad, diseased, broken leg piggie?
I'll refrain from publishing pictures of cruelty on this blog and instead post a link to where you can find out further information about this issue.
Some extra reading comes through Dominion, in which a former speechwriter for President Bush (ignore this) describes how profit-margin-obsession and the separation of farming from the average consumer’s life has led to perfectly nice consumers supporting horrifically cruel conditions for farm animals. Or go for Fast Food Nation, preferably the book over the movie.
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