Pork Producers Prohibit Painful Pig Pens (Op-Ed)

Piglet in a crate — While this pig is resting comfortably in a milk crate at a fair, gestation crates are brutally small enclosures the pork industry uses to house breeding pigs. Cargill has made an announcement that it will now be eliminating the tight, restrictive crates.

(Image credit: Suzanne Danziger.)

Matthew Prescott is food policy director for The Humane Society of the United States. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Recently, Cargill — America's largest private corporation — rocked the food world when it announced plans to eliminate gestation crates from its supply system. Gestation crates are tiny cages that confine pigs so restrictively they can barely move an inch during their entire lives. The crates, about two feet wide by seven feet long, are roughly the same dimensions as a pregnant sow’s own body, preventing her from even turning around.

The life cycle of a confined breeding sow is as such: the animal is locked inside a gestation crate and impregnated. For the four months she is gestating, the sow lingers in the cage, essentially immobilized, day and night. As she prepares to give birth, she is transferred to a different — albeit similarly restrictive cage — called a farrowing crate. She spends a few short weeks weaning her piglets there, is re-impregnated and put back into a gestation crate. The cycle repeats for nearly four years, after which the animal is sent to slaughter.

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Luker is right. Putting aside for a moment the animal-welfare implications of locking animals in cages and lining them up like parked cars, the industry's trajectory is clear if it wants to remain a competitive American enterprise. In the past two years alone, dozens of global food companies — including McDonald's, Burger King, Costco, Kroger, Safeway, Oscar Mayer and about 60 others — have announced they intend to drop from their supply chains pork producers that use gestation crates.

The latest scientific reviews of this issue support her view. For example, when the Prairie Swine Center, a prestigious pork industry research firm, compared animal housing systems that confine pigs in gestation crates with "group housing," which allows pigs greater freedom of movement, their study concluded that "better welfare can be achieved when sows are not confined throughout gestation." As the report found, “Research comparing group housed sows to those in crates found that the animals unable to exercise due to stall confinement have lower bone strength, muscle mass, and decreased physical fitness and cardiovascular health.”

For one month concluding in December 2010, an HSUS investigator worked inside a Virginia factory farm documenting the inhumane treatment of female breeding pigs and piglets. This Murphy-Brown facility is the livestock production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, Inc., and is the world’s largest pork producer. At the Waverly facility, more than 1,000 sows suffer in gestation crates every day. Female breeding pigs were crammed inside "gestation crates" so small the animals could barely move for virtually their entire lives. The animals engaged in stereotypic behaviors such as biting the bars of crates, indicating poor well-being in the extreme confinement conditions. Some had bitten their bars so incessantly that blood from their mouths coated the fronts of their crates. The breeding pigs also suffered injuries from sharp crate protrusions and open pressure sores that developed from their unyielding confinement.

Science plus consumer support have motivated some major pork producers to move toward group housing. In 2007, Smithfield Foods — the world's largest pork producer — announced that it would eliminate gestation crates from all company-owned barns; earlier this year, it extended that commitment to affect all the contractors producing piglets for the company. In 2012, Hormel Foods, the maker of SPAM, followed suit. And last January, Tyson Foods announced it had advised the farmers in its system that future sow housing should allow animals to turn around and engage in other natural behaviors that gestation-crate confinement prevents.

Scientists, veterinarians and the world's largest food brands — not to mention several top producers like Cargill — have made it clear that gestation crates are outdated, and on their way out. Those of us in a civil society who value a healthy, sustainable food system — one that treats animals as more than factory widgets — believe that this move toward a more humane way of farming and eating is long overdue and most welcome.

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