Essere Animali has documented acts of violence — often gratuitous — carried out at some Italian farms. Even with hammers, against pigs. This happened in Ancona.
We are not thousands of kilometres away from Italy. We are in the province of Ancona, it is 2018, and the pigs being beaten, given electric shocks and struck on the head with hammers belong to a supplier to Italian excellence. The footage was documented by a worker infiltrated by the organisation Essere Animali, who used a hidden camera to gather evidence that immediately prompted the intervention of the Ancona Carabinieri forestali.
The hammer most likely used to kill the sick animals — some of which lay dying for a long time — was seized, as were the electric tasers that some workers, as the video shows, used to torment even pregnant and sick sows. Also seized were the iron pipes used to beat the animals and the equipment for tail docking and castration. There were also said to have been some partial admissions by the workers.
The petition launched by Essere Animali against the farm of horrors
The petition was launched to call for the immediate revocation of the farm's authorisations and was signed by tens of thousands of people within just a few days. Health minister Giulia Grillo also posted a tweet to reiterate that the filmed images document irregularities.
Institutions should send a clear signal against this violence and shut the farm down immediately, but the investigations we have been publishing for many years demand a broader reflection. Failing to address the "bug" in the system would make our thinking shortsighted.
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If just a handful of people, as in the farm that was documented, are forced to raise two thousand pigs confined in seven sheds at an intense work pace, it will not only be the animals that become stressed — so will the farmers themselves. And if any of them are prone to violent behaviour, the situation can spiral out of control. In doing so, however, meat can be sold to consumers at a low price.
To this day, practices that cause physical and psychological suffering to millions of pigs remain legal. In Italy, 500,000 sows are confined in gestation crates, where they spend roughly half their lives. Near the time of giving birth they would want to build a nest for their young, but they cannot because they are immobilised in a crate, and so they develop stereotyped behaviours, lameness and injuries.
To this day, piglets are castrated without anaesthetic. Millions of pigs have their testicles removed to improve meat quality. The same applies to tails: they are docked on 98 per cent of young pigs reared in Italy. And yet systematic mutilation has been banned across the European Union for no fewer than 24 years — but everyone does it anyway, because otherwise the animals cannibalise one another, so cramped are their conditions and so deprived of any stimulation.
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But beyond this — have you ever watched a pig at the slaughterhouse? It wriggles and tries to escape. The scientific community agrees in considering pigs as intelligent as dogs. For everyone, they are still just ham. Who knows whether one day we will manage to condemn not only illegal farms, but the very idea that eating meat is worthwhile. After all, it is only our taste buds.
