Moving the world for pigs

Pigs are intelligent, curious and empathetic animals. Given the choice, they would spend their days socializing with friends, rooting around for food and resting on comfortable bedding.

Sadly, pigs living on factory farms are not permitted to show off their intelligence or follow their instinctive curiosity. In factory farms across the world, pigs are confined to barren, small steel cages. Mother pigs have it especially bad: inseminated in a cage no bigger than an average household refrigerator; with barely enough room to move, they are unable to even turn around.

  • Confined: Mother pigs are cramped so tightly in cages, they can’t turn around. Their muscles wither and they become weak
  • Mutilated: Piglets' teeth are ground or clipped, their tails are cut, and males are castrated. All in the first weeks of their lives, often without pain relief.
  • Injured: Pigs raised for meat are kept in barren pens with uncomfortable flooring. They suffer from skin lesions and disease.

Learn more in 'A Pig's Tale: Exposing the facts of factory farming'.

No life for a pig

A life inside a cage the size of a refrigerator is no life for a pig at all. We're pushing for pigs to have the opportunity to express natural behaviour and socialize, free from the confines of cages and free from painful mutilations. In order to achieve those goals, we're calling on the industry to make a change.

 

There is a better way

Mother pigs don’t belong alone in cages. They should be free to socialize with other pigs. These intelligent creatures deserve a life beyond suffering.

We are working with producers to develop higher welfare systems, to get pigs out of cages and into social groups, to end painful mutilations and to provide manipulable materials to allow for expression of natural behaviour.

In contrast to factory farming, good animal welfare reduces stress, injury and disease, decreasing the need to use antibiotics too often.

We want producers and supermarkets to give pigs a better life

Pigs in group housing with enrichment

We’re targeting some of the largest pork producing markets across the world with a focus on China, Thailand, Brazil, and the US.

We're asking producers to stop using equipment which confines mother pigs so tightly in cages that they can’t turn around. This confinement in a cage no bigger than the average refrigerator leads to weakened muscles and a lifetime of mental suffering.

We're also asking for an end to barren environments where pigs cannot live as natural pigs would. 

By 2020, we aim to improve the lives of 175 million pigs every year, by alleviating the most intense suffering inflicted in the production system through close confinement and barren environments.

Poor welfare practices create more problems

These growing pigs have little space and have had their tails docked

Superbugs found in pork sold on supermarket shelves in Spain, Thailand and Brazil

We found superbugs – which are bacteria resistant to the antibiotics most critically important to humans – in pork on supermarket shelves in Spain, Thailand and Brazil. The findings support existing evidence that routine overuse of antibiotics in farm animals is a significant contributor to the rise of superbugs, as recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN.

Routine overuse of antibiotics in factory farming has become a band-aid solution for poor welfare practices, which is leading to antibiotic resistance and creating superbugs.

Antibiotics are administered to sick animals, which are often sick as a result of intensive factory farming methods. If farms use high-welfare practices, the animals are less likely to get sick and fewer antibiotics will be needed. Employing high-welfare practices on farms will also reduce the use antibiotics for disease prevention.

Read our report 'Pork and the superbug crisis: How higher welfare farming is better for pigs and people'.

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