Farm Sanctuary is a place where all farm animals can feel at home without the need to “pay” for housing. With the idea that animal cruelty will end some day for farm animals, Farm Sanctuary promotes rescue, education and advocacy. Their message is one of compassion for animals that are exploited by agriculture.

The organization works to ensure that ‘factory farming’ does not get out of hand - Factory farming is the idea that animals and the natural world are mere commodities to be exploited for profit. In agriculture this attitude led to institutionalized animal cruelty, causing animal and human health risks.

For example, corporate hog factories replacing traditional hog farms, pigs raised for food are being treated more as inanimate tools of production than as living, feeling animals. From beginning to end, this system is a nightmare from which the animals have no escape, and it all starts with the breeding sows.

Modern breeding sows are treated like piglet-making machines. Living a continuous cycle of impregnation and birth, each sow has more than 20 piglets per year. After being impregnated, the sows are confined in gestation crates – small metal pens just 2 feet wide that prevent sows from turning around or even lying down comfortably. At the end of their four-month pregnancies, they are transferred to similarly cramped farrowing crates to give birth. With barely enough room to stand up and lie down and no straw or other type of bedding to speak of, many suffer from sores on their shoulders and knees. When asked about this, one pork industry representative wrote, “…straw is very expensive and there certainly would not be a supply of straw in the country to supply all the farrowing pens in the U.S.”

Numerous research studies conducted over the last 25 years have pointed to physical and psychological maladies experienced by sows in confinement. The unnatural flooring and lack of exercise causes obesity and crippling leg disorders, while the deprived environment produces neurotic coping behaviors such as repetitive bar biting and sham chewing (chewing nothing).

After the sows give birth and nurse their young for two to three weeks, the piglets are taken away to be fattened, and the sows are re-impregnated. An article in Successful Farming explains, “Any sow that is not gestating, lactating or within seven days post weaning is non-active,” and hog factories strive to keep their sows “100% active” in order to maximize profits. When the sow is no longer deemed a productive breeder, she is sent to slaughter.

Approximately 105 million pigs are raised and slaughtered in the U.S. every year. As babies, they are subjected to painful mutilations without anesthesia or pain relievers. Their tails are cut off to minimize tail biting, an aberrant behavior that occurs when these highly-intelligent animals are kept in deprived factory farm environments. In addition, notches are taken out of the piglets’ ears for identification.

By two to three weeks of age, 10% of the piglets will have died. Those who survive are taken away from their mothers and crowded into pens with metal bars and concrete floors. A headline from National Hog Farmer magazine advises, “Crowding Pigs Pays…”, and this is exemplified by the intense overcrowding in every stage of hog confinement systems. Pigs will live this way, packed into giant, warehouse-like sheds, until they reach a slaughter weight of 250 pounds at 6 months old.

The air inside hog factories is so polluted with dust, dander and noxious gases from the animals’ waste that workers who are exposed for just a few hours per day are at high risk for bronchitis, asthma, sinusitis, organic dust toxic syndrome (ODTS) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Unlike these workers, the pigs have no escape from this toxic air, and roughly half of all pigs that die between weaning and slaughter succumb to respiratory disease.

Poor air quality, extreme close-quarters confinement and unsanitary living conditions combine to make diseases such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), swine influenza virus (SIV) and salmonellosis a serious threat to animal welfare.

If you are interested in becoming involved you can join the Walk for Farm Animals, for complete list of local Walk for Farm Animals click here.

Source: http://www.farmsanctuary.org/

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