Thinking About Pigs

Bruce Wagman

Pigs have been on my mind a lot lately.  Years ago I met several of them at the Farm Sanctuary home in Orland, California, and while I already had appreciated their complex personalities and emotional lives, getting to spend time with them changed the knowledge to revelation.  We sat on a riverbank with Gene and scratched pig bellies in the sun and watched them playing, eating, lounging.  The grunts of joy and doglike behavior was notable from the guy I was petting.  He was halfway onto his 1000-plus pound back, grunting and snuffling while I rubbed and cooed to him.  That day, probably fifteen years ago, has never left me, and my love of his species was further informed by my visits and introductions to the great pig friends I have made at Animal Place.  They impressed me as a thoughtful, prescient, and extremely playful bunch; eminently curious, very thoughtful, and wise. 

That’s a great image but mainly, for the past ten years or so, when I think of pigs, I think of mother-torture.  From dealing with the issues and cases, I now have, seared in my mind, images of “gestation crates” or “sow stalls,” those confinement technique weapons of cruelty that the modern pig meat industry utilizes for commercial efficiency, while simultaneously robbing their pigs of every sense of being an individual, a pig, a mother.    A select group of female pigs are chosen, presumably for their genetic superiority, to be turned into living machines who are repeatedly impregnated until they are worn out and wasted by the industry and then thrown out like so many pounds of trash.  During their lives they go from gestation crate (while pregnant) to farrowing crate where, after giving birth, they are placed so that their young can suckle but cannot otherwise interact with their mom, who is again kept on a concrete slab inside bars, in an area that is usually slightly smaller than the mother, so that she not only has to lie in her waste, but she is also pushed into metal bars 24-7.  Pigs in these confinement situations suffer in pain from the lack of exercise and movement, and experience psychological damage from the lifetime of deprivation and denial.

Unless we can establish that pigs have absolutely no feelings – do not feel pain, do not feel emotion, have no internal life and mind – this level of confinement raises problems.  And that’s why it has been one of the few current practices in the farmed animal industry that has been successfully challenged in limited places around the country.  In 2001, the Florida Constitution, banning the practice after a phase-out period.  Arizona, Oregon, Colorado and California followed with statutes prohibiting gestation crates.  Other practices were also covered by these laws, but the point here is that at some level, the meat-consuming public (as well as plenty of vegetarians) agreed that it was not willing to be complicit in this kind of treatment.  And we have been successful in litigation as well.  In Animal Legal Defense Fund v. Corcpork, ALDF and consumers challenged the use of gestation crates at a 9000-pig facility in California.  As part of the settlement in that case, Corcpork shut down its California operation.

Hooray for those states, and any that follow.  This is important incremental change – both geographically and with respect to the treatment challenged.  And there are those who actually criticize these laws as “welfarist” because they implicitly acknowledge the continued use of animals for food.  In this debate, my focus remains with the animals, not the theorists and philosophers.  Call it anthropomorphism, but for me this is the proper analysis:  I know from my studies of pigs that they largely feel pain like I do; I know that they have large brains that are similar to the structure of mine.  I make the small jump then to assume they suffer both physically and psychologically – virtually indisputable.  So what I do is I then imagine myself as a pig, in a situation akin to a gestation crate – painful, alone, deprived of virtually all semblance of humanity except intake and output.  Then I imagine two people coming up to me.  One has a shirt that says “Animal Protection and Welfare” and the other has a shirt that says “Abolition or Death.”  The first offers me a way out of my situation, so that I can live a life with a greater degree of freedom, more of a semblance of humanity, although I will still be used for the same purposes.  The other asks me to live my entire life and then die in pain and misery so that s/he, standing outside my cage and going home to a comfortable bed every night, can try to stop all people from eating meat in my lifetime, a task we must all agree is virtually impossible.  Call it selfish, call it self-centered, and definitely call it my opinion, but I think that most pigs will choose the better life, with the hopes that people will continue to grow in their appreciation of the pig species.  But for the lives of millions of other pig mothers, I think the improvement is a major success, and not one to be sacrificed in the name of abolition.  If we can change the life experience of ten – never mind millions of – animals, it is a fight worth fighting and winning.

And let’s not think the battle is won because a few states have made the move.  There is still a mountain of resistance to even these small changes.  In New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals v. New Jersey Dept. of Agric., 196 N.J. 366 (2008), the court held that the Department of Agriculture’s decision to allow this kind of crating “although controversial, falls well within its area of expertise.”  So in all but the few states that have banned gestation crates, the practice continues to affect millions of pigs every year.  (North Carolina has the highest concentration of pig farming operations in the country.)  This is a great highlight for all of us who care about the animals — it seems like the majority, or at least the most influential part of society, do not think even these most extreme practices need changing.

I saw “pork cheek” on a menu last week, and simultaneously gagged and was outraged.  The meat departments in supermarkets scream out in silence behind their pretty plastic wrappers.  And every Mother’s Day, while paying due gratitude to my human mom, I spend hours in stunned pain considering the millions of mothers lying on cold cement floors, helplessly lying in their excrement and unable to interact with their young in any way except as a supplier of nutrition so that they can be shipped off, grown fat, and killed. 

I guess I think about pigs all the time.