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
I tremble for my species when I reflect that God is just.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
Each man is haunted until his humanity awakens.
—WILLIAM BLAKE
As I’ve learned what is being done to today’s farm animals I’ve become increasingly distressed. If our society is to reflect any kind of compassion and respect for life, how can we allow such extreme abuses of sentient beings to continue?
The problem is that the behemoths of modern