The birth – for animal rights activists purposes
A week before giving birth, the mother of X15 and X11 was moved to a farrowing crate, which is a metal cage hardly any bigger than her own body. It measures 65 cm in width and 190 cm in length. Trapped in this prison, she will give birth to her piglets onto bare concrete floor, kept behind bars.
In the wild, sows build themselves a large comfortable nest to give birth in. They dig out a patch of earth and then collect foliage and lay it down in the dug out area to make a soft bed. In Austrian pig farms as well as the one documented here, sows are given no possibility to build a nest - it’s not cost effective for the farmer. But still, the sows show that their need to make a nest is important by their attempts to scratch and dig at the concrete floor.
When the piglets are born, the mother has a strong maternal need to care for her babies. But, trapped behind bars, she can’t even touch them. The piglets can reach her underneath the bars in order to suckle. The modern intensive farmer fears that the sow would bite her babies to death or smother them when laying down if it were not for the farrowing crate. That wouldn’t be surprising considering the way sows are forced to live! In a natural environment with enough space and where mother and piglets can form a bond, these kind of problems are hardly ever heard of.
But here it’s all about keeping costs to a minimum and maximising profit. Animal welfare is not a priority.
The film showing the birth of the piglets demonstrates this cost-benefit calculation: The piglets are born directly onto slatted floor, cold bare concrete – and the mother can’t help them, she can’t even sniff them to see if they are alright.
Group housing
In the breeding unit where X15 and X11 were born, sows are sometimes allowed to spend time in groups. From 2013 group housing for sows in Austria will become compulsory by law.
But what does this apparent improvement really amount to?
Due to the fact that there will be various exceptions, what this really means for sows is that they will have 11 weeks between births where they can have some freedom of movement, but they will still have 9 weeks at a time caged up in a sow stall. Nearly half a sow’s life will still be spent in isolation behind bars.
In the heated discussion about this so called improvement, the central question is often not heard due to the massive resistance from the agricultural lobby:
What, apart from having the right through brute strength, allows us to degrade the lives of these intelligent, friendly individuals to tortured breeding machines?
