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