Diet for a New America 25th Anniversary Edition. John Robbins
and cannibalism. Forced into equally bizarre conditions, pigs are likewise driven completely out of their minds. One reporter noted:
Some animals may become so fearful that they dare not move, even to eat or drink. They become runts and die. Others remain in constant, panicked motion, neurotic perversions of their instinct to escape. Cannibalism is common in swine… operations.36
One of the most common problems in modern pork factories is known in the trade as “tail-biting.” The trade journals are full of discussions about tail-biting and what to do about it. When I first heard the phrase “tail-biting,” I rather naively pictured some kind of playful nipping at little, curly, pink tails. But I have since learned how very far from the mark I was. “Tail-biting” is the industry’s term for the deranged and desperate actions of powerful animals driven berserk by the frustration of every single one of their natural urges.
Acute tail-biting… frequently results in crippling, mutilation, and death…Many times the tail is bitten first, and then the attacking pig or pigs continue to eat further into the back. If the situation is not attended to, the pig will die and be eaten.37
Tail-biting, naturally, disturbs the managers of the pork factories, who can’t sell a pig that’s been eaten by another pig. Not being the types to sit back and let a disaster like that occur, they’ve come up with a number of bizarre solutions.
One strategy is to keep the pigs in total darkness. A March 1976 edition of Farm Journal carried an article titled “Cut Light and Clamp Down on Tail Biting.” This report reassured pork producers:
They can still eat—total darkness has no effect on their appetites.38
The preferred method of preventing tail-biting in today’s pork factories, however, is a trick the pork producers picked up from the poultry men. They can’t, of course, de-beak pigs, because pigs don’t have beaks. But they have found another way of preventing tail-biting that, like chicken de-beaking, does absolutely nothing to correct the grotesque conditions that give rise to the behavior in the first place.
They cut off the pigs’ tails.
This practice, known in the trade as “tail-docking,” is now standard operating procedure in United States pork production.39 Its application is nearly universal today, despite the fact that it causes severe pain to the animals and drives them even crazier. I asked one pork farmer about tail-docking, and he replied, somewhat angrily:
They hate it! The pigs just hate it! And I suppose we could probably do without tail-docking if we gave them more room, because they don’t get so crazy and mean when they have more space. With enough room, they’re actually quite nice animals. But we can’t afford it. These buildings cost a lot.40
This farmer’s remarks don’t reflect his thoughts alone. They are typical of the rationale behind virtually all of the steps being taken today toward even more mechanized pork production. Having invested great sums of money in confinement buildings and automated feeding systems, today’s producers feel they must use every trick in the book to get the maximum number of piglets per sow and cram as many pigs as possible into the buildings.41
In fact, the trade journal Hog Farm Management has an even better idea than the parking lot–like stalls. How about stacking the pigs in cages, one on top of another, like shipping crates? Just think how many more animals you could get in a building this way. Explaining the brilliance of having not only wall-to-wall pigs but floor-to-ceiling pigs as well, the journal reasoned:
There’s too much wasted space in a typical controlled-environment single-deck nursery. The cost of the building is just too big a cost factor. Stacking the decks spreads the building cost out over more pigs.42
A number of today’s largest pig factories have been so impressed with this idea that they’ve wasted no time in employing it. You might not think that it would make that much difference to a pig who is already crammed into a cage so small he can hardly move, whether there are other pigs above him in the same plight. But it does. The excrement from the pigs in the upper tiers falls steadily on the pigs in the lower tiers.
Anger and Tears from a Pork Producer
It’s actually gotten to the point that many of today’s pig farmers are being forced to do things even they find abhorrent. I’m not talking now about people who are particularly empathetic toward animals. I’m referring to people who long ago came to accept bashing an animal’s brains out or slitting its throat as all in a day’s work. These are hardened veterans of the everyday brutalities of animal farming, but even they are increasingly disgusted by what is happening today.
In a 1976 issue of Farmer and Stockbreeder, a letter appeared that expressed the concern of such an old-timer. He was writing in response to a report on a new cage system for pigs.
May I dissociate myself completely from any implication that this is a tolerable form of husbandry? I hope many of my colleagues will join me in saying that we are already tolerating systems of husbandry which, to say the least of it, are downright cruel… Cost effectiveness and conversion ratios are all very well in a robot state; but if this is the future, then the sooner I give up both farming and farm veterinary work the better.43
The same year, a retired farm veterinarian sent a thoughtful letter to the factory farming journal Confinement.
More and more I find myself developing an aversion to the snow-balling trend toward total confinement of livestock… If we regard this unnatural environment as acceptable, what does it portend for mankind itself?… How can a truly human being impose conditions on lower animals that he would not be willing to impose on himself? Freedom of movement and expression should not be the exclusive domain of man…What (then) of human behavior (in the future)? Will it sink to the nadir of contempt for all that is naturally bright and beautiful? Will all of us become tailbiters without recognizing what we have become?44
These two letters were written in 1976, just as total-confinement systems for pork production were gathering steam. Since then, despite the pleas of these and other warning voices, the trend has continued: more total confinement, more frustration of all the animals’ natural urges, more farming by automation and technology, more drugs, and more assembly-line pork.
And what happens to those farmers who just can’t stand to do this to animals whom they know are intelligent and capable of lasting friendships with people? Most have quit the whole affair in disgust and failure. Others have continued on, often with an aching sense of frustration and defeat as they capitulate time and time again out of financial necessity to the harsh economic reality of modern farming. One such pig farmer told me, angrily:
Sometimes I wish you animal lovers would just drop dead! Just go and fall off a cliff or something. It’s hard enough to make a living these days without having to be concerned about all this stuff!
Later that night, after dinner and a long talk in which he opened up to his true feelings, this same farmer told me, with tears in his eyes:
I’m sorry I got so mad at you before. It’s not your fault. You are just showing me what I already know, but try not to think about. It just tears me up, some of the things we are doing to these animals. These pigs never hurt anybody, but we treat them like, like, like I don’t know what. Nothing in the world deserves this kind of treatment. It’s a shame. It’s a crying shame. I just don’t know what else to do.
The American Pork Queen Speaks
The National Pork Council and related organizations spend millions of dollars a year to convince the public that today’s pigs are as happy as can be with the way they are raised. In May 1987, the Council officially and unabashedly proclaimed that pork producers “have historically treated their farm animals with the utmost care and respect.” Each year, the Pork Council sends an official American Pork Queen out across the country to enlighten schools and community groups about the joys of modern pork production. Speaking about her work, one year’s