A new eyewitness exposé released by animal rights charity Peta reveals pigs languishing in shocking conditions on a farm in Yorkshire.
Documented by two unnamed members of the public, the footage shows pigs with open wounds forced to live in filthy pens next to piles of rotting carcasses. One piglet is seen laying helplessly, apparently struggling to breathe, while his cage mates are forced to step over him. Heaps of discarded syringes and drug equipment, used to prevent disease linked to squalid and severely crowded farming conditions, were also recorded. The video follows an equally distressing Peta exposé of pig farms in Yorkshire and Norfolk released in March.
“The suffering exposed in this video is not the exception – it is almost certainly the rule”, says Peta associate director Elisa Allen “The only way for consumers to avoid contributing to the systematic suffering of animals on factory farms is to leave animals off their plates and instead choose from the abundant vegan options available in supermarkets today.”
As documented by Peta, man piglets on UK farms have their teeth clipped or ground down and their tails cut off without being given any painkillers. Before they give birth, mother pigs are confined to farrowing crates so small that they can’t even turn around, let alone fulfil their strong urge to build a nest as they would naturally do. They’re forcibly impregnated over and over again, and each litter of piglets is torn away from them after only a few weeks and transported to fattening pens before eventually being sent to slaughter.