Over the next 10 years Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the US will phase out the use of gestation crates, restraint devices used in the pork industry to severely restrict the movement of pregnant gilts and sows, and which house them throughout their pregnancies of just under four months. Gestational housing of this type is the underpinning of “modern” pig farming that permits the concentration of tens of thousands of animals—and their waste products—in a single facility and a minor reduction in the number of newborn and infant piglets lost to accidental crushing or suffocation by their mother.
Two items notable by their absence from this announcement need a bit more clarification: the company’s release makes no mention of the phase-out of farrowing crates; gestation crates and farrowing crates are not the same thing. We’re saying it one more time for the back rows and balcony: gestation crates and farrowing crates are not the same thing.
While they both derive from the same perspective (production “efficiency”), serve the same physical function (severe restriction of animal movement), and may be identical in physical design (components and cubic feet), they do not serve the same operational function. Ask repeatedly and with insistence on a definitive answer and you’ll finally get that distinction out in the open.
Could a sow spend three months of her life in an unbedded, indoor-only, communal group pen then wind up back in the same crate she was in the year before the phase-out, spend three weeks there with her piglets, be removed to group housing for 21 days, re-artificially inseminated, and start the whole process over again? Yeah, but you’d have to account for the white space in the Smithfield release and statements to get to that scenario and it’s not one we’re making as a far-fetched assumption.
We find it more than a bit ironic that the company’s position today is this u-turn in both practical husbandry and operational philosophy “will not have a detrimental effect on our animals,” as the pork production industry has built its post-WWII mantra on the specious assertion of group and/or loose housing as antithetical to the health and safety of naturally competitive and rambunctious gilts and sows.
While we applaud this decision by one of the world's largest food conglomerates, we can’t help but wonder if this is a defensive position taken in reaction to the overwhelming groundswell of citizen initiative and backlash against the rationalization that putting a 500 lb. animal, comparatively a teenager, in a 7x2’ steel and concrete living space for the length of her life means more consumer purchasing power, thereby more consumer choice, hence more freedom.
Yes, freedom has a price. Yes, those who purchase the pork industry’s products have demonstrated time and dollar-again that they are willing to pay those few extra pennies per pound to let another creature take more than two steps forward or backward in life. Yes, it took hundreds of millions of lives wretchedly abused, tortured from birth to death, discarded and then forgotten, plus a few short years of in-house, purely science-based research, for the industry to arrive at the conclusion that a pig is still a pig, and they can make of her nothing more nor less.
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