by Paul Shapiro

It’s hard to imagine a turnaround as stunning as the pork industry’s this week.

On Tuesday, HBO began airing a poignant 87-minute film about the abuse of pigs trapped in Ohio’s agribusiness industry (further showings can be found here). Death on a Factory Farm chronicles the impressive work of an employee at Wiles Pig Farm who secretly videotapes 500-pound breeding sows trapped in two-foot-wide cages in which they can’t even turn around for months on end. This practice—known as gestation crate confinement—is standard in the U.S. pork industry, despite being banned because of its cruelty throughout the European Union. These crates have also been banned in Florida, Arizona, Oregon, Colorado and California, but Ohio still permits them.

The film also depicts workers killing lame pigs by wrapping a chain around their necks, suspending them from a tractor, and hanging them execution-style. It takes 4-5 minutes before the pigs stop thrashing in the air. Despite such appallingly inhumane treatment caught red-handed on video, a judge acquitted the factory farm owner and his employees on charges related to the hangings.

In the wake of the film’s first airing on HBO, the pork industry was quick to react. The National Pork Producers Council issued a statement saying it “condemns” the images seen in the film, and that such practices are “abhorred by responsible pork producers.”

Really?

That tune is a bit different from the industry’s response when this cruelty case first came to light two years ago. As the film depicts, producers rallied around the defendants in the case, showing up to court in solidarity with them and even raising thousands of dollars for legal defense bills. If the industry was condemning anyone at all, it certainly wasn’t the workers who perpetrated the cruelty, but rather it was aimed squarely at the whistle-blowing employee.

Even more clearly, the president of the Ohio Pork Producers Council lauded the acquittal, asserting it was a “’huge victory’ for the livestock industry.” If the pork industry’s leaders so ardently support killing pigs by hanging them with chains and tractors, what won’t they defend?

If the pork industry was serious about improving the welfare of the animals it uses, the first thing it should do is lead the charge to end the confinement of pigs in gestation crates. Millions of these social, intelligent animals are suffering in these cages right now, barely able to move an inch at all. They’ve committed no crime, yet they’re punished in ways we wouldn’t force on the most notorious criminals.

Phasing out these crates might not prevent every possible form of cruelty pigs endure. But by ending such a common-yet-abusive practice would reduce an enormous amount of animal suffering. Surely it’s the very least these animals from whom we take so much deserve.

takepart with the Humane Society’s Think Outside the Crate Campaign

Paul Shapiro is the Senior Director of Factory Farming Campaign for the The Humane Society of the United States

(Photo: The Humane Society of the United States)