Many brutalities for a little pleasure

"Modern'' pig factories are like poultry farms -- industrial complexes where the pig is not a living, breathing creature, but simply a ...

"Modern” pig factories are like poultry farms — industrial complexes where the pig is not a living, breathing creature, but simply a ‘pork producer’. Pig farmers abroad don’t call themselves that. They are officially known as "pork production engineers.” Their main magazine, Hog Farm Management, writes: "Forget that the pig is an animal. Treat him like a machine in a factory. Schedule treatment like you would lubrication. Breeding season like the first step in an assembly line. And marketing like the delivery of finished goods.”

Here is how the ‘machinery’ is kept all over the world: Each pig is placed in a stall so cramped that it can hardly move — it is called a ‘bacon bin’. The floors are slatted over large pits into which go the urine and faeces, producing ammonia, methane and hydrogen sulphide.

Pigs have a highly developed sense of smell. Indeed, traditionally they were used in ranches to smell out rare species of mushroom. Here, day and night, they breathe this foul air. This air makes them listless, they lose weight, start coughing and develop respiratory problems — which is why they are constantly fed tetracycline antibiotics.

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These confined pigs, apart from developing pneumonia, very quickly get painful lesions on their feet and legs. They sit and stand abnormally to try and relieve the pain and very soon their joints and muscles become crippled as well.

Bedding could reduce the pain — but who provides bedding to pork chops ? According to the editorial in Farmer and Stock-Breeder: "The animal will usually be slaughtered before serious deformity sets in.”

Each time the piglets are taken away from the pig within a week. She calls and cries for them till her milk dries away and she is immediately made pregnamt again. This goes on until the stress kills her. Imagine intelligent sensitive creatures, tortured by standing in their own waste, their legs full of painful running sores, their skeletons deformed. Many go completely mad with the pain and fear. They start attacking and biting the tails of the pig next to them. But the factory managers have an answer to this as well. First the pigs are kept in darkness as they have found that pigs are less active in the dark. They would cut off their beaks like chickens, if pigs had beaks. But they don’t, so the next best thing is done. They cut off the pig’s tails.

What are these creatures fed? That is, apart from the sulpha drugs and hormones. They are fed recycled waste, raw poultry and pig manure.

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What is happening to us? How can we talk about Hitler’s chambers of death and the thousands of people who took part in the killing – when each one that eats meat is part of this inhuman system of mass torture. The animal, a sensitive, pain-feeling, knowledge-filled creature, is kept with such contempt and killed with such brutality, a process institutionalised on such a mass scale as your appetite for its flesh increase. It is plain and simple murder and your perverted appetite (for man’s body is vegetarian) cannot justify it.

In some cases water is thrown on the pig and then he is touched with a low voltage prong – one of the most painful things to happen, because while his brain is fully alive and his senses screaming, his body is inoperative. Haven’t you seen someone receive a mild shock and heard him scream ? At Trichur in Kerala, no stunning or paralysing equipment is used. The pigs are killed by repeated blows to the head with a hammer. In Tamil Nadu, it is believed that pork tastes best when the animal has not been cut. So the butchers take a red hot iron rod and pole it into the anus of the tightly held pig. As the animal cries and screams the poker is shoved deeper and deeper in, tearing all the internal organs one by one till it reaches the heart and the pig dies. The operation takes thirty minutes.

Is this the same humane India which we talk about ? As long as you eat pork, the inhumanity shall grow. The WSPA report is international. Think of how we look down on Spain for its disgusting animal tormenting sports. Think of how the rest of the world is going to regard us when they read this report. And deservedly so.