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,