Wednesday, 15 December 2010 20:48
The investigator—who spent a month working inside a Smithfield-owned facility in Waverly, Va.— documented numerous abuses including the following:
- Female breeding pigs were crammed inside "gestation crates" so small the animals could barely move for virtually their entire lives. The animals engaged in stereotypic behaviors such as biting the bars of crates, indicating poor well-being in the extreme confinement conditions. Some had bitten their bars so incessantly that blood from their mouths coated the fronts of their crates. The breeding pigs also suffered injuries from sharp crate protrusions and open pressure sores that developed from their unyielding confinement.
- The investigator never saw a veterinarian at the operation. A barn manager told the investigator to ignore a pig with a basketball-sized abscess on her neck, and then cut the abscess open with an unsterilized razor.
- Employees jabbed a lame pig's neck and back with gate rods to force her to move.
- Three times, the investigator informed employees that a pig was thrown into a dumpster alive. The animal had been shot in the forehead with a captive bolt gun, which is designed to render an animal unconscious, and was thrown in the dumpster still alive and breathing.
- Employees mishandled piglets and tossed them into carts.
- Some piglets prematurely born in gestation crates fell through the slats into the manure pits.
"If this is the best that Smithfield can do, it is evident that there are terrible problems in the nation's pig industry," stated Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The HSUS. "It is indefensible for Smithfield to allow its sows to linger in crates barely larger than their bodies for months on end."
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