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3. THE MOST UNJUSTLY MALIGNED OF ALL ANIMALS

Whenever people say “we mustn’t be sentimental,” you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, “we must be realistic,” they mean they are going to make money out of it.

—BRIGID BROPHY

There is a single magic, a single power, a single salvation, and a single happiness, and that is called loving.

—HERMANN HESSE

In our human blindness concerning the feelings, intelligence, and sensitivity of animals, there is one in particular about whom we’ve been most wrong. If it were possible to measure our misunderstanding about our fellow creatures on some giant scale, our ignorance of this particular animal might well be the greatest of all. This is an animal who has been abused and ridiculed by people for centuries but who is actually a friendly, forgiving, intelligent, and good-natured animal when he isn’t mistreated. I am talking, you may be surprised to find out, about the pig.

The Hidden Truth about Pigs

To call a man a pig, or a woman a sow, is one of the worst insults in our common speech. This fact testifies not to the nature of pigs but to our beliefs about them and only shows how far out of touch we are with these animals. The commonly held image of pigs as greedy, fat, and filthy creatures, gross beasts who eat anything that isn’t fastened down, and who selfishly indulge their basest instincts without a trace of sensitivity, could hardly be further from the truth.

Pigs actually have one of the highest measured I.Q.s of all animals, surpassing even the dog’s. They are friendly, sociable, fun-loving beings as well. One person very familiar with pigs was naturalist W. H. Hudson. He wrote in his acclaimed Book of a Naturalist:

I have a friendly feeling toward pigs generally, and consider them the most intelligent of beasts, not excepting the elephant and the anthropoid ape… I also like his attitude toward all other creatures, especially man. He is not suspicious, or shrinkingly submissive, like horses, cattle and sheep; not an impudent devil-may-care like the goat; nor hostile like the goose; nor condescending like the cat; nor a flattering parasite like the dog. He views us from a totally different, a sort of democratic standpoint as fellow-citizens and brothers, and takes it for granted, or grunted, that we understand his language, and without servility or insolence he has a natural, pleasant, camerados-all or hail-fellow-well-met air with us.1

In the common mind, pigs are disgusting creatures, but in fact the only thing disgusting about pigs is our attitude toward them. They are playful, sensitive, friendly animals who like to roll around and rub on things and consider the earth their home and not something with which to avoid contact. In a state of nature, pigs love to wallow in the mud, just as stags and buffaloes and many other animals do. But pigs don’t love mud for its own sake. They use it to cool themselves off and to gain relief from the flies. They enjoy themselves exuberantly because it is their way to enjoy what they do with robust good nature. People who have seen them in mud have accused them of being filthy animals, not understanding their simple love of the earth. However, when living in anything even remotely resembling their natural conditions, pigs are as naturally clean as any other forest creature.² If at all possible, they will never soil their own bedding, eating, or living areas.

But for many years it was the belief in Europe that the filthier the state in which a pig was kept, the better tasting the pork would be. Hence it became commonplace for pigs to be kept in a fashion that made it impossible for them to stay clean. Even then, though, they would often go to great lengths to maintain as clean a living situation as they could manage.

Hudson’s Pig

Did you know that pigs recognize people, remember individuals clearly, and appreciate human contact when it is not hostile? The naturalist W. H. Hudson wrote a beautiful account of a pig:

Not knowing my sentiments, [the pig] looked askance at me and moved away when I first began to visit him. But when he made the discovery that I generally had apples and lumps of sugar in my coat pockets he all at once became excessively friendly and followed me about, and would put his head in my way to be scratched, and licked my hands with his rough tongue to show that he liked me. Every time I visited the cows and horses I had to pause beside the pigpen to open the gate into the field; and invariably the pig would get up and coming toward me salute me with a friendly grunt. And I would pretend not to hear or see, for it made me sick to look at his pen in which he stood belly-deep in the fetid mire; and it made me ashamed to think that so intelligent and good-tempered an animal should be kept in such abominable conditions…

One morning as I passed the pen he grunted—spoke, I may say—in such a pleasant friendly way that I had to stop and return his greeting; then, taking an apple from my pocket I placed it in his trough. He turned it over with his snout, then looked up and said something like “Thank you” in a series of gentle grunts. Then he bit off and ate a small piece, then another small bite, and eventually taking what was left in his mouth he finished eating it. After that, he always expected me to stay a minute and speak to him when I went to the field; I knew it from his way of greeting me, and on such occasions I gave him an apple. But he never ate it greedily; he appeared more inclined to talk than to eat, until by degrees I came to understand what he was saying. What he said was that he appreciated my kind intentions in giving him apples. But, he went on, to tell the real truth, it is not a fruit I am particularly fond of. I am familiar with its taste as they sometimes give me apples, usually the small unripe or bad ones that fall from the trees. However, I don’t actually dislike them. I get skim milk and am rather fond of it; then a bucket of mash, which is good enough for hunger; but what I enjoy most is a cabbage, only I don’t get one very often now. I sometimes think that if they would let me out of this muddy pen to ramble like the sheep and other beasts in the field, or on the downs, I should be able to pick up a number of morsels which would taste better than anything they give me. Apart from the subject of food, I hope you won’t mind me telling you that I’m rather fond of being scratched on the back.

So I scratched him vigorously with my stick and made him wriggle his body and wink and blink and smile delightedly all over his face. Then I said to myself: “Now what the juice can I do more to please him?” For though under sentence of death, he had done no wrong, but was a good, honest-hearted fellow mortal, so that I felt bound to do something to make the miry remnant of his existence a little less miserable.

I think it was the word “juice” I had used—for that was how I pronounced it to make it less like a swear-word—that gave me an inspiration. In the garden, a few yards back from the pen, there was a large clump of old eldertrees, now overloaded with ripening fruit—the biggest clusters I had ever seen. Going to the trees, I selected and cut the finest bunch I could find, as big round as my cap, and weighing over a pound. This I deposited in his trough and invited him to try it. He sniffed at it a little doubtfully, and looked at me and made a remark or two, then nibbled at the edge of the cluster, taking a few berries into his mouth, and holding them some time before he ventured to crush them. At length he did venture, then looked at me and made more remarks, “Queer fruit this! Never tasted anything like it before, but I really can’t say yet whether I like it or not.”

Then he took another bite, then more bites, looking up at me and saying something between the bites, ’til, little by little, he had consumed the whole bunch; then, turning round, he went back to his bed with a little grunt to say that I was now at liberty to go on to the cows and horses.

However, the following morning he hailed my approach in such a lively manner, with such a note of expectancy in his voice, that I concluded he had been thinking a great deal about elderberries, and was anxious to have another go at them. Accordingly, I cut him another bunch, which he quickly consumed, making little exclamations the while—“Thank you, thank you, very good, very good indeed!” It was a new sensation in his life, and made him very happy, and was almost as good as a day of liberty in the fields and meadows and on the open green downs.

From that time on I visited him two or three times a day to give him huge clusters of elderberries. There were plenty for the starlings as well; the clusters on those trees would have filled a cart.

Then one morning I heard an indignant scream from the garden, and peeping out saw my friend, the pig, bound hand and foot, being lifted by a dealer into his cart with the assistance of the farmer. ³

It made Hudson happy to feel he could bring cheer to the last days of this sociable and sensitive animal, destined though he was for the butcher. Of course, it is not to be expected that the average person should be quite as sensitive in translating the grunts and growls as a trained naturalist. Nevertheless, I want to stress the good-naturedness of pigs because we have done them such a terrible injustice in the way we think of them, even to using their name as a vile insult.

But why have we given such a bad name to an animal who is full of intelligence and honest-hearted zest for life; why have we so demeaned a creature capable of endearing and lasting friendships with human beings? It would perhaps be easier to understand if we did this to the crocodile, for example, who historically has been a real threat to our lives and seems to have something about him of the darkness. But the pig? The loyal, friendly, likable pig?

Part of the answer, at least, is rather simple. The pig is guilty of having flesh that human beings find tasty.

Man has an infinite capacity to rationalize his rapacity, especially when it comes to something he wants to eat.

—CLEVELAND AMORY

Since few of us have any direct experience with pigs anymore, we can think and speak of them as foul and unwholesome beasts without being disturbed by the facts of the matter. But down through the ages, people who have kept pigs have sensed their undeniable intelligence and friendliness. Only by looking the other way could human beings manage to justify what they have done in order to have bacon and ham, just as black humans were dehumanized in the minds of whites in order to justify their oppression and slavery.

Schweitzer’s Pig

When Albert Schweitzer was in Africa running a volunteer hospital, he had a standing offer out to the natives that if they brought him an animal that they would otherwise have killed, he’d pay them for it. In such manner did he save numerous animal lives, create an entourage of assorted critters around him, and show the natives new possibilities of interacting with the local animals. He wrote a remarkable account of meeting a pig.

One day a Negro woman brought me a tame wild boar about two months old. “It is called Josephine, and it will follow you around like a dog,” she said. We agreed upon five francs as the price. My wife was just then away for a few days. With the help of Joseph and n’Kendju, my hospital assistants, I immediately drove some stakes into the ground and made a pen, with the wire netting rather deep in the earth. Both of my black helpers smiled.

“A wild boar will not remain in the pen; it digs his way out from under it,” said Joseph. “Well, I should like to see this little wild boar get under this wire netting sunk deep in the earth,” I answered. “You will see,” said Joseph.

The next morning the animal had already gotten out. I felt almost relieved about it, for I had promised my wife that I would make no new acquisition to our zoo without her consent, and I had a foreboding that a wild boar would not, perhaps, be to her liking.

When I came up from the hospital for the midday meal, however, there was Josephine waiting for me in front of the house, and looking at me as if she wanted to say: “I will remain ever so faithful to you, but you must not repeat the trick with the pen.” And so it was.

When my wife arrived she shrugged her shoulders. She never enjoyed Josephine’s confidence and never sought it. Josephine had a very delicate sensibility about such things. In time, when she had come to understand that she was not permitted to go up on the veranda, things became bearable. On a Saturday some weeks later, however, Josephine disappeared. In the evening the missionary met me in front of my house and shared my sorrow, since Josephine had also shown some attachment to him.

“I feel sure she has met her end in some Negro’s pot,” he said.

“It was inevitable.”

With the blacks a wild boar, even when tamed, does not fall within the category of a domestic animal but remains a wild animal that belongs to him who kills it. While he was still speaking, however, Josephine appeared, behind her a Negro with a gun.

“I was standing,” he said, “in the clearing, where the ruins of the former American missionary’s house are still to be seen, when I saw this wild boar. I was just taking aim, but it came running up to me and rubbed against my legs! An extraordinary wild boar! But imagine what it did then. It trotted away with me after it, and now here we are. So it’s your wild boar? How fortunate that this did not happen to a hunter who is not so quick-witted as I.”

I understood his hint, complimented him generously, and gave him a nice present.4

Later, writing of the same boar, Schweitzer spoke of her coming to church and causing an uproar by behaving like a wild pig, but then gradually learning to “behave more properly in church.” Struck again and again by the spirit of this animal, Schweitzer wrote:

How shall I sufficiently praise your wisdom, Josephine! To avoid being bothered by gnats at night, you adopted the custom of wandering into the boys’ dormitory, and of lying down there under the first good mosquito net. How many times because of this have I had to compensate, with tobacco leaves, those upon whom you forced yourself as a sleeping companion. And when the sand fleas had so grown in your feet that you could no longer walk, you hobbled down to the hospital, let yourself be turned over on your back, endured the knife that the tormentors stuck into your feet, put up with the burning of the tincture of iodine, with which the wounds were daubed, and grunted your sincere thanks when the matter was once and for all done with.5

The Fragrance of the Farm

Since I have found that pigs are such endearing and friendly chaps, I don’t look at pork chops the way I once did. And there’s something else I’ve learned that has forever changed the way I feel about such things as bacon and ham.

What I have learned is that the pork farmers have by and large followed the lead of the poultry industry in recent years. Instead of pig farms, today we have more and more pig factories.

The result is not a happy one for today’s pigs.

Some of today’s pig factories are huge industrial complexes, with over 100,000 pigs. You might think that would require an awful lot of pigpens. But the pigpen, like the chicken yard, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Every day, more and more of these robust creatures are placed in stalls so cramped that they can hardly move.

If you were to peek inside one of the buildings in which these stalls are kept, you’d see row upon row upon row upon row of pigs, each standing alone in his narrow steel stall, each facing in exactly the same direction, like cars in a parking lot.

But you would hardly notice what you saw, because you’d be so overwhelmed by the stench. The overpowering ammonia-saturated air of a modern pig factory is something no one ever forgets.

You see, many modern pig stalls are built on slatted floors over large pits, into which the urine and feces of the animals fall automatically. Thousands of this type of confinement system are in operation, in spite of the fact that many serious diseases are caused by the toxic gases (ammonia, methane, and hydrogen sulfide) that the excreta produce and that rise from the pits and become trapped inside the building.⁶

Pigs have a highly developed sense of smell and their noses are, in a natural setting, capable of detecting the scents of many kinds of edible roots, even when those roots are still underground. In today’s pig factories, however, they breathe night and day the stench of the excrement of the hundreds of pigs whose stalls are in the same building. No matter how much they might want to get away, no matter how hard they might try, there is no escape.

The pig factory I am describing is unfortunately not an isolated bad example. It’s par for the course today. Just a couple of years ago, the owner of Lehman Farms of Strawn, Illinois, was chosen Illinois Pork All-American by the National Pork Producers Council and the Illinois Pork Producers Association. The Lehman farm is considered an industry model, and it is, in fact, one of the more enlightened swine management programs around today. But it seems to leave a little bit to be desired from the point of view of the pigs who call it home. When a “herdsman” at Lehman Farms, Bob Frase, was asked about the effect the ammonia-saturated air had on the pigs, he replied:

The ammonia really chews up the animals’ lungs. They get listless and don’t want to eat. They start losing weight, and the next thing you know you’ve got a real respiratory problem—pneumonia or something. Then you’ll see them huddled down real low against one another trying to get warm, and you’ll hear them coughing and gasping. The bad air’s a problem. After I’ve been working in here awhile, I can feel it in my own lungs. But at least I get out of here at night. The pigs don’t so we have to keep them on tetracycline.7

“Forget the Pig Is an Animal”

In my visits to modern pig factories, I keep thinking about pigs I have met, social critters much like Albert Schweitzer’s Josephine, very capable of warm relationships with people. I remember their friendly grunts and their enjoyment of human contact. This is why I have such a hard time accepting the advice of contemporary pork producers:

Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory. Schedule treatments like you would lubrication. Breeding season like the first step in an assembly line. And marketing like the delivery of finished goods.

—HOG FARM MANAGEMENT, SEPTEMBER 1976⁸

Modern pig farmers, who like to be called pork production engineers, pride themselves on having a clear purpose. The trade journal Hog Farm Management put it concisely:

What we are really trying to do is modify the animal’s environment for maximum profit.9

Even if an individual pig raiser feels an empathy with the animals in his charge and has a desire to do things in a more natural way, he is today practically forced to go along with the agribusiness momentum. The trend is set. Trade journals like Hog Farm Management, National Hog Farmer, Successful Farming, and Farm Journal are constantly telling farmers: “Raise Pork the Modern Way.”

The trade journals tend to be downright hostile to anything but the most mechanized agribusiness ways of producing pork. Recently, National Hog Farmer became irate at the USDA and editorialized, “Why don’t we just turn the Department of Agriculture over to the do-gooders?”¹⁰ What on earth had the USDA done to provoke such a terrifying thought? It had proposed spending two hundredths of 1 percent of its budget for two small projects that would have encouraged small-scale, local production of food, such as roadside markets and community gardens in urban areas.

The trade magazines, it must be remembered, derive their income from advertisers, and these are just the people who profit from the swing to total-confinement systems of pork production—the huge commercial interests who sell equipment and drugs to the farmers. They’re the ones who take out full-page ads and pay for space in the journals to tell the farmers: “How to Make $12,000 Sitting Down!”¹¹ That’s quite a way to catch the attention of an exhausted farmer, who is only too glad to sit down at all after laboring on his feet all day.

So he reads on. And what does he find? The way to success in today’s pork production world is through buying a “Bacon Bin.”¹² This wonderful new doorway to success, he is told, “is not just a confinement house… It is a profit producing pork production system.”¹³

Actually, the Bacon Bin is a completely automated system whose designers clearly have overcome any vestiges of the anachronistic idea that pigs are sentient beings. In a typical Bacon Bin setup, 500 pigs are crammed into individual cages, each getting seven square feet of living space. It’s difficult for us to conceive how confined this is. Every pig spends his entire life cramped into a space less than one-third the size of a twin bed.

The Bacon Bin system comes complete with slatted floors and automated feeding systems, so that it takes only one person to run the whole show. Another advantage of the system is that, with no room to move about, the pigs can’t burn up calories doing “useless” things like walking, and that means faster and cheaper weight gain, and so more profit.

A typical example of Bacon Bin farming was happily described in the Farm Journal beneath the title: “Pork Factory Swings into Production.”¹⁴ The article begins proudly:

Hogs never see daylight in this half-million dollar farrowing-to-finish complex near Worthington, Minnesota.15

This is something to brag about?

Pig’s Feet Modern Style

Pigs’ feet and legs were designed to scratch for food, to kick or claw if needed for defense, and to stand and move on different kinds of natural terrain. But in today’s pig factories, the floors are either metal slats or concrete. Peter Singer and Jim Mason, authors of Animal Factories, the classic book on contemporary food-animal raising, have described what happens to pigs’ feet under these conditions.

Pigs are cloven-hoofed animals, and, in most, the outer half of the hoof (“claw”) is longer than the inner half. Outdoors, the extra length is absorbed by the natural softness of the soil. On the concrete or metal floors of the factory pen, however, only the tissue in the foot can “give.” As a result, many confined pigs develop painful lesions in their feet which can open and become infected. Pigs with these foot sores usually develop… abnormal posture in an attempt to relieve the pain. Eventually, the crippling may worsen when this abnormal movement and weight distribution overworks joints and muscles in the legs, back, and other parts of the pig.16

One Nebraska study showed that nearly 100 percent of all pigs raised on concrete or metal slats had damaged feet and legs.¹⁷ Providing bedding can reduce the problem,¹⁸ but bedding is rarely provided in the modern homes of the pigs destined to become America’s pork chops, because straw costs money, and the pain and suffering the pigs endure from damaged feet and legs is not figured into the financial equations that determine policy. Of course, the pork producers are aware that the animals are crippled by the flooring, but they are not disturbed. As the editors of Farmer and Stockbreeder explain:

The slatted floor seems to have more merit than disadvantage. The animal will usually be slaughtered before serious deformity sets in.19

In other words, the pigs are usually slaughtered before their deformities become so extreme as to affect the price their flesh will fetch. One producer summarized industry thinking rather colorfully.

We don’t get paid for producing animals with good posture around here. We get paid by the pound!20

As I look at the situation, I doubt whether the pigs who spend their painful lives on these devastating floors, hobbling about on distorted skeletons, are able fully to appreciate this kind of logic.

Improving on Mother Nature

It may not be wise to tamper with nature. It may even be disastrous. But you can be sure that if it’s profitable, someone is certain to give it a try. The leading edge in pork production these days is in getting more pigs per sow per year. The idea is to turn sows into living reproductive machines.

The breeding sow should be thought of, treated as, a valuable piece of machinery, whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.

—NATIONAL HOG FARMER, MARCH 1978²¹

In a barnyard setting, a sow will produce about six piglets a year. But modern interventions have cranked her up to over 20 a year now, and researchers predict the number to reach 45 within a short time.²² Producers rave about the prospect of being able to force sows to give birth to over seven times the number of children nature designed them for.

They’ve got it down to a science. First of all, piglets are taken away from their mothers much earlier than would ever occur in any natural situation. Without her babies to suck the milk from her breast, the sow will soon stop lactating, and then, with the help of hormone injections, she can be made fertile much sooner. Thus, more piglets can be extracted from her per year.

Unfortunately, the poor sow is not up-to-date enough in her thinking to appreciate the wonders of a system in which she will spend her whole life producing litter after litter, only to have her babies taken away from her as soon as possible after each birth. The sow calls and cries for them, though her distressed sounds always go unheeded. Not having gotten the hang of modern factory life, she only knows that her whole being is filled with an inexorable instinct to find her lost babies and care for them.

Most pork producers have found that they have to let the piglets suckle from their mother for a couple of weeks before taking them away, or else they die, which, of course, defeats the whole purpose. But at least one large manufacturer of farm equipment sees the waste in such an operation and is now strongly promoting a device it calls Pig Mama.²³ This is a mechanical teat that replaces the normal one altogether and allows the factory manager to take the piglet away from his mother immediately and get her back to the business of being pregnant, just a couple of hours after birth. Noting this development, Farm Journal said it was looking forward to “an end to the nursing phase of pig production.”²⁴ The result, they predicted gleefully, would be a

tremendous jump in the number of pigs a sow could produce in a year.25

For years now, pork breeders have also been hard at work developing fatter and fatter pigs. Unfortunately, the resulting products of contemporary pork breeding are so top-heavy that their bones and joints are literally crumbling beneath them.²⁶ However, factory experts see nothing amiss in this because there is additional profit to be made from the extra weight.

There are, however, a few problems with the new model pig rolling across the assembly line in today’s pork factories that do concern the factory experts. Singer and Mason point out a few of these problems in Animal Factories.

The pig breeders’ emphasis on large litters and heavier bodies, coupled with a lack of attention to reproductive traits, has produced… high birth mortality in these pigs. These new, improved females produce such large litters that they can’t take care of each piglet. To cure this problem, producers began to select sows with a greater number of nipples—only to discover that the extra nipples don’t work because there’s not enough mammary tissue to go around.27

Not to be dismayed, however, the genetic manipulators are continuing their efforts to “improve” the pig and convert this good-natured and robust creature into a more efficient piece of factory equipment.

Breeding experts are trying to create pigs that have flat rumps, level backs, even toes, and other features that hold up better under factory conditions.28

Hormone City

What they can’t accomplish with genetics, today’s pork producers shoot for with hormones. Hormones, as you may know, are incredibly potent substances that are naturally secreted, in minute amounts, by the glands of all animals, pigs and humans included. It takes minuscule amounts of these substances to control our entire endocrine and reproductive systems. If our taste buds were as sensitive to flavor as our target cells are to hormones, we could detect a single grain of sugar in a swimming pool of water.²⁹

Given the immensely powerful effects that hormones have on animals’ reproductive systems, even in concentrations so low they are discernible only by the most sophisticated laboratory technology, many scientists are extremely concerned about their use in animal farming, acknowledging that we know very little about many of the potentially dangerous effects of these substances. The factory experts, however, look through very different eyes. When they first realized the new drugs gave them the power to control a sow’s estrus, and thus to induce or delay her fertility, they were overjoyed.

Estrus control will open the doors to factory hog production. Control of female cycles is the missing link to the assembly line approach.

—FARM JOURNAL30

One pork producer was so taken with this new development that he called it the greatest advance in hog production since the development of antibiotics.31

Another new innovation that has the industry astir is called embryo transfer.³² Here a specially chosen sow is dosed with hormones to cause her to produce huge numbers of eggs, rather than the usual one or two. These eggs are fertilized by artificial insemination, then surgically removed from the sow and implanted in other females. It is not uncommon for a breeder sow to go repeatedly through this unnatural violation until the stress kills her.

At the University of Missouri, work is being done in test tubes to combine sperm and eggs that have been taken from specially selected breeding animals.³³ The newly fertilized eggs are then implanted surgically in ordinary females.

Once a sow in today’s pork factories is pregnant, she is injected with progestins or steroids to increase the number of piglets in her litter. She will also be given products like the new feed additive from Shell Oil Company. Called XLP-30, it is designed to “boost pigs per litter,”³⁴ though it has a name that makes it sound like it should be added to motor oil instead of animal food. Incredibly, a Shell official acknowledges—“we don’t know why it works.”³⁵ Undeterred by such ignorance, however, the industry is not at all reluctant to tamper with the reproductive systems of the animals whose flesh is designed for human consumption. Anything that can speed up the assembly line and improve profits is considered fair practice.

A Life of Suffering

It is difficult for us to fathom the suffering of today’s pigs. They are crammed for a lifetime into cages in which they can hardly move, and forced against their natures to stand in their own waste. Their sensitive noses are continuously assaulted by the stench from the excrement of thousands of other pigs. Their skeletons are deformed and their legs buckle under the unnatural weight for which they have been bred. Their feet are full of painful lesions from the concrete and slatted metal floors on which they must stand.

I have looked into their eyes and I can tell you it’s a terrifying sight. These sensitive, tortured creatures have been literally driven mad.

In this respect, they are similar to the chickens who live in today’s “chicken heavens.” Chickens, you may remember, when forced into unbearably crowded conditions, go crazy and develop “vices” such as feather-pecking and cannibalism. Forced into equally bizarre conditions, pigs are likewise driven completely out of their minds. One reporter noted:

Some animals may become so fearful that they dare not move, even to eat or drink. They become runts and die. Others remain in constant, panicked motion, neurotic perversions of their instinct to escape. Cannibalism is common in swine… operations.36

One of the most common problems in modern pork factories is known in the trade as “tail-biting.” The trade journals are full of discussions about tail-biting and what to do about it. When I first heard the phrase “tail-biting,” I rather naively pictured some kind of playful nipping at little, curly, pink tails. But I have since learned how very far from the mark I was. “Tail-biting” is the industry’s term for the deranged and desperate actions of powerful animals driven berserk by the frustration of every single one of their natural urges.

Acute tail-biting… frequently results in crippling, mutilation, and death…Many times the tail is bitten first, and then the attacking pig or pigs continue to eat further into the back. If the situation is not attended to, the pig will die and be eaten.37

Tail-biting, naturally, disturbs the managers of the pork factories, who can’t sell a pig that’s been eaten by another pig. Not being the types to sit back and let a disaster like that occur, they’ve come up with a number of bizarre solutions.

One strategy is to keep the pigs in total darkness. A March 1976 edition of Farm Journal carried an article titled “Cut Light and Clamp Down on Tail Biting.” This report reassured pork producers:

They can still eat—total darkness has no effect on their appetites.38

The preferred method of preventing tail-biting in today’s pork factories, however, is a trick the pork producers picked up from the poultry men. They can’t, of course, de-beak pigs, because pigs don’t have beaks. But they have found another way of preventing tail-biting that, like chicken de-beaking, does absolutely nothing to correct the grotesque conditions that give rise to the behavior in the first place.

They cut off the pigs’ tails.

This practice, known in the trade as “tail-docking,” is now standard operating procedure in United States pork production.³⁹ Its application is nearly universal today, despite the fact that it causes severe pain to the animals and drives them even crazier. I asked one pork farmer about tail-docking, and he replied, somewhat angrily:

They hate it! The pigs just hate it! And I suppose we could probably do without tail-docking if we gave them more room, because they don’t get so crazy and mean when they have more space. With enough room, they’re actually quite nice animals. But we can’t afford it. These buildings cost a lot.40

This farmer’s remarks don’t reflect his thoughts alone. They are typical of the rationale behind virtually all of the steps being taken today toward even more mechanized pork production. Having invested great sums of money in confinement buildings and automated feeding systems, today’s producers feel they must use every trick in the book to get the maximum number of piglets per sow and cram as many pigs as possible into the buildings.⁴¹

In fact, the trade journal Hog Farm Management has an even better idea than the parking lot–like stalls. How about stacking the pigs in cages, one on top of another, like shipping crates? Just think how many more animals you could get in a building this way. Explaining the brilliance of having not only wall-to-wall pigs but floor-to-ceiling pigs as well, the journal reasoned:

There’s too much wasted space in a typical controlled-environment single-deck nursery. The cost of the building is just too big a cost factor. Stacking the decks spreads the building cost out over more pigs.42

A number of today’s largest pig factories have been so impressed with this idea that they’ve wasted no time in employing it. You might not think that it would make that much difference to a pig who is already crammed into a cage so small he can hardly move, whether there are other pigs above him in the same plight. But it does. The excrement from the pigs in the upper tiers falls steadily on the pigs in the lower tiers.

Anger and Tears from a Pork Producer

It’s actually gotten to the point that many of today’s pig farmers are being forced to do things even they find abhorrent. I’m not talking now about people who are particularly empathetic toward animals. I’m referring to people who long ago came to accept bashing an animal’s brains out or slitting its throat as all in a day’s work. These are hardened veterans of the everyday brutalities of animal farming, but even they are increasingly disgusted by what is happening today.

In a 1976 issue of Farmer and Stockbreeder, a letter appeared that expressed the concern of such an old-timer. He was writing in response to a report on a new cage system for pigs.

May I dissociate myself completely from any implication that this is a tolerable form of husbandry? I hope many of my colleagues will join me in saying that we are already tolerating systems of husbandry which, to say the least of it, are downright cruel… Cost effectiveness and conversion ratios are all very well in a robot state; but if this is the future, then the sooner I give up both farming and farm veterinary work the better.43

The same year, a retired farm veterinarian sent a thoughtful letter to the factory farming journal Confinement.

More and more I find myself developing an aversion to the snow-balling trend toward total confinement of livestock… If we regard this unnatural environment as acceptable, what does it portend for mankind itself?… How can a truly human being impose conditions on lower animals that he would not be willing to impose on himself? Freedom of movement and expression should not be the exclusive domain of man…What (then) of human behavior (in the future)? Will it sink to the nadir of contempt for all that is naturally bright and beautiful? Will all of us become tailbiters without recognizing what we have become?44

These two letters were written in 1976, just as total-confinement systems for pork production were gathering steam. Since then, despite the pleas of these and other warning voices, the trend has continued: more total confinement, more frustration of all the animals’ natural urges, more farming by automation and technology, more drugs, and more assembly-line pork.

And what happens to those farmers who just can’t stand to do this to animals whom they know are intelligent and capable of lasting friendships with people? Most have quit the whole affair in disgust and failure. Others have continued on, often with an aching sense of frustration and defeat as they capitulate time and time again out of financial necessity to the harsh economic reality of modern farming. One such pig farmer told me, angrily:

Sometimes I wish you animal lovers would just drop dead! Just go and fall off a cliff or something. It’s hard enough to make a living these days without having to be concerned about all this stuff!

Later that night, after dinner and a long talk in which he opened up to his true feelings, this same farmer told me, with tears in his eyes:

I’m sorry I got so mad at you before. It’s not your fault. You are just showing me what I already know, but try not to think about. It just tears me up, some of the things we are doing to these animals. These pigs never hurt anybody, but we treat them like, like, like I don’t know what. Nothing in the world deserves this kind of treatment. It’s a shame. It’s a crying shame. I just don’t know what else to do.

The American Pork Queen Speaks

The National Pork Council and related organizations spend millions of dollars a year to convince the public that today’s pigs are as happy as can be with the way they are raised. In May 1987, the Council officially and unabashedly proclaimed that pork producers “have historically treated their farm animals with the utmost care and respect.” Each year, the Pork Council sends an official American Pork Queen out across the country to enlighten schools and community groups about the joys of modern pork production. Speaking about her work, one year’s American Pork Queen, Pam Carney, explained:

Well, I kind of told about myself from the perspective of being a pig…You see, we are getting a lot of questions from people now who are for animal rights and who are worried about pigs being put into small pens and farrowing crates. So, I talked about how much we pigs like the new confinement barns as opposed to living outside in the natural environment, because a herdsman can keep a close eye on us, watch for disease, give us warmth, good feed, and clean water.45

The American Pork Queen reassures us today’s pigs receive good feed and clean water. But the truth, as you might guess, is a little different. In nature, pigs live with gusto and passion, foraging in the earth for their food. Even in a barnyard setting they root around as much as they can, and their diet consists of table scraps along with the foods they can root from the earth. But today, they are fed a completely unnatural diet designed with one thing alone in mind—to make them as fat as possible, as cheaply as possible. Their feed is routinely laced with antibiotics, sulfa drugs, and countless other products of the laboratory. It is a menu that often features recycled waste.

One modern pig farmer proudly announced in Hog Farm Management that in his system pregnant sows don’t need to be fed for 90 days. Presenting his ingenuity as a model for the forward-thinking pig man, he boasted that he simply allows them only what they can find in the manure waste pits beneath the slatted floor cages where young pigs are being fattened for slaughter. His excitement about how much money he saves was not dampened by the fact that during pregnancy the nutritional needs of pigs, like those of any mammal, are especially critical.

The industry norm isn’t much better. Today’s pigs are routinely fed recycled waste, even though this waste consistently contains drug residues and high levels of toxic heavy metals, such as arsenic, lead, and copper.⁴⁶ Often the helpless creatures are simply given raw poultry or pig manure.⁴⁷

I don’t know about you, but eating their own excrement doesn’t strike me as an ideal diet.

But if what today’s pigs are fed leaves a little to be desired, it’s almost a picnic compared to the water they receive to drink. Sometimes the only water they get comes from an

oxidation ditch, which channels the liquid wastes from factory manure pits back to the animals; they have to drink it because it’s the only “water” offered to them.48

Interestingly enough, the industry’s public stance is that the health and well-being of today’s pigs is better than ever.

But over 80 percent of today’s pigs have pneumonia at the time of slaughter. One Minnesota plant found pneumonia in the lungs of 95 percent of the pigs inspected. In 1970, 53 percent of all U.S. pigs had stomach ulcers. The Livestock Conservation Institute reports that pig producers lose more than $187 million each year from dysentery, cholera, abscesses, trichinosis, and other swine diseases.⁴⁹ A disease known as pseudorabies has been wiping out whole herds of factory pigs in the Midwest since 1973.⁵⁰ The National Pork Council wants the government to pay for a five-year program to eradicate pseudorabies. Hog Farm Management thinks this would cost taxpayers $90 million.⁵¹

Of course, that’s not a lot of money compared to the bill for another disease, African swine fever, which is beginning to infect pigs raised the modern way in this country. National Hog Farmer expects the cost of coping with this disease to be in the neighborhood of $290 million.⁵²

The pork industry says these diseases amount to only minor technical problems in the assembly-line production of pork. With the help of taxpayers’ money and the application of more drugs, they say, the problems can be solved in no time. As to the possibility that today’s pigs are not really all that healthy, the industry points to the impressive weights the animals attain as proof that they are as robust as can be. This is a remarkable argument, in that it attempts to equate systematically induced obesity with good health. That’s certainly not true for humans; why should it be true for pigs?

And Then

The pigs I’ve known have been friendly and sensitive critters, like Albert Schweitzer’s Josephine. They can be good friends, playful, loyal, and affectionate. Watching what happens to these good-hearted creatures in today’s pig factories has not been at all easy for me. At each stage of the assembly line they are treated with complete disdain for the fact that they are our fellow creatures. But they are sentient beings, and they remain so to the end.

Before they reach their end, the pigs get a shower, a real one. Water sprays from every angle to wash the farm off them. Then they begin to feel crowded. The pen narrows like a funnel; the drivers behind urge the pigs forward, until one at a time they climb unto a moving ramp… Now they scream, never having been on such a ramp, smelling the smells they smell. I do not want to overdramatize because you have read all this before. But it was a frightening experience, seeing their fear, seeing so many of them go by. It had to remind me of things no one wants to be reminded of anymore, all mobs, all death marches, all mass murders and extinctions. ⁵³

The New Question

Seeing what happens to today’s pigs is especially difficult for me because I know what friendly animals they can be by nature. We have come to know pigs as fat only because we have bred and fed them that way. We have come to know pigs as mean only because we have tortured them and deprived them of any conceivable expression of their energies. We have made them what they are.

Could it be, then, that when we eat the flesh of animals who have been treated with such complete contempt, we assimilate something of their experience and carry it forward into our own lives? Could it be that eating the products of such an insane system may contribute significantly to the feeling pervading mankind today that this earth sometimes resembles the lunatic asylum of the universe?

People of the stature of Plato, Tolstoy, and Gandhi have also refused to eat meat. But today the question of meat-eating has taken on a far more urgent significance than ever before. There is something uniquely painful happening in the way contemporary animals are being raised for meat. Animals have been treated cruelly before, and in some cases sadistically—but the process has never before been institutionalized on such an overwhelming scale. And never before has the cold expertise of modern technology and pharmacology been employed to this end.

Throughout history, there have been people who sensed that eating the flesh of animals killed unnecessarily was not the best thing we could do toward the goal of bringing peace to ourselves and to the world. The more I’ve learned of modern meat production, the more I’ve felt that their message is even more vital today.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual development to leave off the eating of animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came into contact with the more civilized.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.

—LEONARDO DA VINCI