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The life and death of a pig

Posted: 03/13/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

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Are pigs in narrow stalls unhappy, or is it our perception based on false ideas of animal comfort?

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Re: Sow freedom comes at a price for producers (Feb, 21). Laura Rance reports on the consumer-driven demand to get pregnant pigs out of their cages, which cripple their legs and leave them with nothing to do but eat, drink, sleep and defecate in the same sunless place.

The public has become increasingly aware of this system of intensive confinement only because animal-welfare people have exposed it for the profit-making machinery that it is. University professors in faculties of agriculture across the country have continued to endorse the system, calling the cages "independent gestation accommodations" and noting that people can "care" for the animals when they're immobilized in one place. Language creates its own reality; it's a powerful way of getting people to see what they want to see.

Indeed, when I debated Laurie Connor, the head of animal sciences at the U of M, in 2009, Connor urged the audience to "see the pig" and not the "bars of the cage;" she also quoted the "science" that a pig "does not have a strong behavioural need to turn around," and is thus comfy and cosy in cages barely bigger than her body.

What she didn't tell the audience was that these pigs suffer lesions from being pressed against the bars of the cages for life, frustration (exhibited in biting the metal bars of the crates), lameness, urinary-tract infections, and upper-respiratory infections.

Rance's article notes that profit and efficiency lie behind the entrapment of these animals in cages and that the welfare of the animals has had nothing to do with this business model. It is alarming, then, that university professors across Canada have continued to instruct students in a cage's "value," despite the evidence that the animals suffer within it. Their position is that more research needs to be done and that we animal-rights activists and researchers shouldn't lead or influence the conversation.

Hogwash.

Manitoba Pork, along with its corporate-sponsored research at my university, is delaying what pork producers should have been urged to do years ago: plan to move pigs into group housing and apply for government funding to do so.

Instead, they are "encouraging" producers to switch the system by 2025, arguing that they need the faculty of agriculture to help them figure it out. What this date means is this: another decade of producers and professors making money from a system described by Temple Grandin (in her most recent book) as "the worst thing that ever happened to pigs."

DANA MEDORO

Winnipeg

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 13, 2012 A11

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