Facts on Animal Rights and veg*n issues: Factory Farming: PIGS
Knowing is better than believing!
Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory. Schedule treatments like you would lubrication. Breeding season like the first step in a assembly line. And marketing like the delivery of finished goods.J. Byrnes - Raising Pigs by the Calendar at Maplewood Farm - Hog Farm Management Sept 1976
The pigs industry - history Up
The structure and methods of pig farming are rapidly changing. Although most pig farms are still family owned and operated, almost 90% of pigs are in some type of confinement system.
Since the factory systems took hold in the late 1960s, more and more pigs have been produced by increasingly larger operations where small pig farms start to disappear.
In 1982, 47% of all pigs were raised by farms selling more than one thousand pigs a year (US).
In 1986 these middle to large sized farms produced just over 70% of the nation's pigs (US).
Hog Farms Up
Hog farms couldn't excist without the use of antibiotics. As a to high number of pigs are crowded together on to little space disease is always around.
Due to borness and stress cannibalism is common and takes the form of tail bitting. All this aggression and activity wears the pigs out, where it is not uncommon for a pig to drop dead from stress when they are weaned, moved to a new pen, mixed with strange pigs, shipped,...
The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.LJ Taylor - National Hog Farmer March 1978
Breeding Saws Up
Breeding sows spend their entire live in tiny metal crates without movement space. Shortly after giving birth, they are once again forcibly impregnated. This cycle continues for years until their bodies finally give out and they are sent to be killed.
FAQs and numbers Up
At total confinement pig farms the pigs never see daylight until they are put on the truck for the trip to the slaughterhouse.
Two-thirds of all pigs produced in the United States, or around fifty-three million animals a year, spend their lives in a total confinement pig farm.
One hog alone can excrete up to 17.5 pounds of manure and urine each day. On a factory farm with 35,000 hogs, over 4 million pounds of feces and urine are produced each week. That ammounts to over 200 million pounds of waste each year, on one farm. Even a smaller farm with 1,000 hogs will produce over 6 million pounds of waste each year (Water Pollution Control Research Series).
In the U.S., antibiotics are added to 90% of starter feeds, 75% of grower feeds and more than half of finishing feeds for pigs (Keep Antibiotics Working - Dec. 2003).
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