PETA Slams Wagga Wagga Pig Racing and Roasting Event As “Creepy and Macabre”
11.09.2026
Wagga Wagga – Following complaints from the public regarding the Punt Hotel’s planned ‘Pig Day Out’, which combines live pig races with a spit roast and salami competition, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, has sent the hotel owners a letter asking them to instead race remote control cars and serve vegan pork.
“Pigs are intelligent, curious, social animals who feel emotions and pain just like we do”, says PETA Executive Agent Mimi Bekhechi. “They suffer when forced to run for noisy crowds or are slaughtered for their flesh. We’re urging the Punt Hotel to cancel this event and everyone to see pigs for who they are – not salami or sprinters, but someone”.
Pigs’ intellect and capacity for a range of complex emotions are well documented. Professor Donald Broom, Emeritus Fellow of Veterinary Medicine at Cambridge University, has identified that pigs “have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly [more so than] three-year-olds.”
Despite this, more than 15,000 pigs are slaughtered every day in Australia alone. Most are crammed into dark, filthy sheds where they never see daylight or engage in natural behaviours such as foraging or nesting. Pregnant and nursing sows are confined to crates so small that they cannot even turn around and never get to bond with their piglets before their babies are gassed or electrocuted, and then their throats are slit at just six months old.
In its letter, PETA labelled the event “macabre”, noting that, “When you showcase animals’ adorable personalities and then serve up their corpses on a plate, you teach children that it’s okay to exploit others for our own pleasure, no matter how much they suffer. Animals deserve better, while toy cars can’t feel pain or stress, making them the perfect alternative for a thrilling and entertaining race.”
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” – points out that when it comes to the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a pig is a dog is a boy. For more information, please visit PETA.org.au and follow PETA on Facebook and Instagram.
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