You Won’t Believe What Pork Producers Do to Pregnant Pigs

Imagine spending your whole pregnancy in an airline seat. That’s what happens to most of the nation’s expecting sows.


Illustration: Rick Sealock

Illustration: Rick Sealock

Like a lot of food-obsessed people, I love pork. The chef David Chang, whose Manhattan restaurant Momofuku is practically a porcine temple, once declared the pig a “mystical, magical animal.” In addition to being delicious, pigs are profoundly smart and social creatures that can even be taught to play simple video games with their snouts. (The jury’s out on whether doing so lowers their IQs.)

Yet despite pigs’ many lovable qualities, of all the billions of beasts confined in our meat factories, the most miserable may be the 5.9 million sows that churn out the piglets that grow into chops, bacon, and ham.

Throughout their four-month pregnancies, many of these sows live in cages just large enough to contain their bodies. As the sows grow bigger, the tight confinement means they can lie face down but can’t flop over onto their sides. The floors under these “gestation crates” are slotted so that urine and feces can slip through into vast cesspits. Immobilized above their own waste, the sows are exposed to high levels of ammonia, which causes respiratory problems. Just before they deliver, they’re moved to farrowing crates, in which they have just enough space to nurse.

Once the piglets are weaned, it’s back to the gestation crate for the breeding sow, which averages two and a half pregnancies per year. After three or four years, the sow is slaughtered for meat.

While there’s some justification for farrowing crates—they prevent the sows from squashing their babies—the gestation stalls are mostly about cost-cutting: They allow producers to cram together as many working sows as possible. Not surprisingly, living most of its life in the functional equivalent of a coach airline seat—to use animal-welfare expert Temple Grandin’s comparison—is horrific. In 2010, when Humane Society investigators infiltrated a Virginia farrowing operation owned by Smithfield, the globe’s largest hog producer and pork packer, they found sows with “open pressure sores and other ulcers and wounds that developed from their unmitigated confinement and their inability to change positions in the crate.” At one point, an undercover HSUS investigator alerted a boss to a “basketball-sized abscess” on the neck of one sow. (Ted Genoways writes about agribiz efforts to ban undercover filming in factory farms in “Gagged by Big Ag.”) The manager first advised ignoring the growth—and then simply sliced it open with an “unsterilized razor.” In Smithfield cages—which hold about a seventh of the breeding sows in the United States—the HSUS documented sows repeatedly biting the bars of their cage, sometimes until “blood from their mouths coated the fronts of their crates.” The company fired three employees as a result of the HSUS’s findings.

Stung by video exposés, giant pork buyers including McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Subway, and Jack in the Box have encouraged their suppliers to phase out the crates. After much squealing, industry giants like Smithfield, Cargill, and Hormel have all pledged to do so over the next five years. Already, Cargill has phased out crates in half of its sow facilities.

But while these moves are welcome, Smithfield, Cargill, and Hormel keep less than 20 percent of all the working sows. The rest of the $97 billion pork industry—including contractors that supply meat to the big three—has refused to get on board.

Richard Berman, a notorious PR flack who recently helped Smithfield bust its unions, has taken to the pages of the industry trade publication PorkNetwork to urge producers to cling to their gestation crates, which he prefers to call “maternity pens.” His advice: Ignore the issue. If the industry holds steady, he wrote, “it will prevail.”

Whether it should stick to its guns is another question. Research has shown that keeping sows in group housing, with room to stretch out, is economically feasible. Nine US states have banned crates, as has the European Union, and a 2008 Michigan State University poll found that 69 percent of respondents nationwide favor doing so. Then there’s the tide of warnings in the trade press; one editorial in Western Producer noted, “You’d have to have rocks in your head to build a new sow barn with gestating sow stalls.” Paul Shapiro, who directs the Humane Society’s farm animal protection efforts, reminded me that more than a decade ago, the egg industry fought an effort to ban forced molting—the practice of periodically starving hens to speed up laying. After consumers pressured big egg buyers like McDonald’s and Wendy’s, the industry eventually was forced to end the practice. If consumers make as big of a stink about gestation crates, I think we can win this one, too. If we don’t, it might force many of us to forswear pork—and I, for one, would really miss it.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate