How mother pigs are kept in modern farms to maximize efficiency



    by CalpurniaSomaya

    45 Comments

    1. AdTraditional8077 on

      I used to work at one. They used to take the deformed baby pigs and smash their head on the floor to kill them, then later they changed to sticking them in a Walmart cooler and gassing them. They also take the shit and intestines from dead sick piglets and put them in a blender with some of the feed and feed them to the mother pigs to promote immunity. The pigs were so loud it sounded like Jurassic Park in there. Glad I don’t work there anymore.

    2. This setup is to prevent the mother from rolling on her piglets and killing them. Without that context it looks bad, but could be much worse if they were in the same pen

    3. Traditional-Day-7698 on

      you know why mothers are kept like this? its because the mother pigs have a tendency to lay down on and suffocate the piglets

    4. FabulousEfficiency77 on

      Poor mother… Her life is only this: eat, shit, give birth, nurse and… Repeat

    5. BinnsyTheSkeptic on

      If you eat pork or bacon you are complicit in this cruelty. It’s so easy to just *not* eat those meats. Individual action matters.

      Our culture is too okay with this shit.

    6. BenjaminHarrison88 on

      For farrowing (giving birth and nursing) this kind of confined system actually does help protect the piglets from getting smashed. The less happy thing is some farms keep the sows (mother pigs) in crates for the entire length of their gestation which is pretty cruel.

    7. I aint the biggest vegan but its shit like this that i understand why people want change for animals

    8. I resent bacon tasting so good with the conditions we keep swine in. It takes so very little to make a pig happy.

    9. As far as I know from people that raise pigs is that mother pigs kill a lot of their offspring by crushing them. This might be the industrial way of avoiding this

    10. SpecialOpposite2372 on

      A pig mother will crush its own child to death while sleeping, and it is called **piglet crushing.** One of the risks of pig farming. I just did not know they come up with this as the solution! WTF is this!

    11. flooble_worbler on

      I agree this must be horrible but Actually that cage is used to stop them from rolling onto or laying down on and killing their babies. It doesn’t matter how much space they have they will still do that. We had a sow in a small field shed (about 30ft by 15ft) and she killed all 6 of her piglets. Give clarcksons farm a watch on amazon they come up with a much better solution

    12. Forward-Trade3449 on

      in 100 years I hope we look back at animal cruelty the same way we grew to look back at slavery

    13. heyhowsitgoinOCE on

      I worked in a farm like this once. One of reasons for the cage is because some times the mother will crush and eat the piglets if she’s too stressed out. I saw a pig in a pen by itself once that the other farmers thought had failed at pregnancy, however it had given birth and all the piglets were bitten into, writhing on the ground. My supervisor told me to put them in a bucket and they just left them there in the bucket all day slowly dying

    14. Every_Preparation_56 on

      In Europe there are bans on such things and labels that indicate whether it is, for example, cage farming, barn farming, or free-range farming.

    15. Anyone who’s watched Clarkson’s Farm know exactly why the mother is kept loosely separated from the piglets. Pigs will lay/sit/squish their children to death and not seem to notice, unless you keep them separated when inside of an enclosed space. 8/28 piglets died once, and one of the mother pigs killed her entire litter. One….gruesomely intentional

    16. As long as people aren’t willing to protest with their wallet, this will not stop happening.

    17. SkuggiSkrimsli on

      This is super fucked up but not everyone does this. This is probably some mega-corp.

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