As New Abuse Footage Outrages, Punishment of Pigs Remains Cruel, But Not Unusual
With stomach-turning images of a sow being sexually assaulted in a Victorian abattoir still fresh in our minds, animal liberation advocates from Farm Transparency Project have again released videos exposing suffering at an Australian piggery.
This time, the footage was shot at Dublin’s Andgar Piggery, near Adelaide, and resulted in the euthanasia of fourteen pigs and 21 Animal Welfare Notices being brought against the piggery’s leadership.
The images, which show pigs living alongside — and even feeding on the carcasses of — dead pigs, have rightly been met with shock and disgust, but it’s important to remember that this kind of suffering isn’t remotely anomalous.
For companies that profit from animals, filth and fatalities are business as usual.
The Meat Industry Myth of “A Few Bad Apples”
In order to sell us products from tortured and slaughtered animals, the meat industry must first sell us a lie: that animals are happy and go willingly toward their deaths.
Over decades of advertising, product placement, and high-welfare labelling, animal agriculture has convinced many that eating animals is normal and necessary and that animals don’t mind being meals. As animal abuse exposés have become more common, farmers have also worked even harder to claim that acts of cruelty are the result of rogue operators.
But animals aren’t mere fillets and chops, meaning any use of them is abuse. From fish to pigs, and all species in between, animals are sentient individuals with unique personalities who desire to enjoy their brief time on this planet, just like us.
All farming operations confine animals, subvert their natural behaviours, and slaughter them, and we’re expected to swallow it.
Not Only Pigs, Chickens, Cows, Sheep and Others, Too
There’s a saying in the animal liberation circles: “If what happens on factory farms is so great, why is it animal defenders sharing footage and not farmers?”
The answer is simple: life is far from great for animals in the meat, egg, and dairy industries, or any operation that profits from animals’ fleece, feathers or skins. To date, PETA has released 15 damning exposés of over 150 wool industry operations on four continents, including Australia, revealing workers beating, kicking, and throwing sheep and sewing their gaping wounds shut without pain relief.
Outside of this, sheep used for wool are routinely subject to painful mutilations and killed when their wool production drops. Similarly, widespread cruelty was documented at facilities run by Australia’s largest chicken producer, Baiada, which supplies Steggles and Lilydale chicken brands. But, every day, chickens raised for meat are routinely mutilated and forced to grow unnaturally large too quickly, causing heart attacks, organ failure, and leg deformities.
And, even when egregious abuse isn’t being caught on camera at dairy operations, mother cows are bellowing for their babies, who are snatched away so we can drink the milk made for them.
The bottom line is that nauseating abuses happen all the time in operations that exploit animals. Some make headlines, but many others are legal and routine.
You Don’t Have to Film Animal Cruelty to Help!
Those who unveil the disgusting world of animal agriculture are to be applauded, but you don’t have to storm a piggery to help animals.
When we stop buying meat and other products taken from animals, like eggs, milk, and wool, and demand cruelty-free vegan products instead, we help save animals from suffering.
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