A new investigation confirms the cruelties taking place on pig farms supplying the well-known Dop brand — true industrial operations where animals cease to be animals and become meat-production machines. An editorial by the spokesperson for Essere Animali.
We know this now. On intensive farms, it can happen that, due to the distress caused by the deprivations they are subjected to, animals bite each other until they amputate one another's tails and ears. It can also happen that farmers leave sick animals to die in agony, even if it takes days — perhaps to avoid paying the vet for euthanasia. It can happen, and it does happen, even in the production of what is considered an Italian excellence: Parma ham.
Between February and June, the investigative team at Essere Animali documented the conditions on eight farms supplying Parma ham, located across five provinces in Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy. The footage, also broadcast on national news bulletins, is a punch to the heart. It shows pigs in a state of severe suffering inside dirty, dilapidated facilities. We reported these farms to the Carabinieri Forestali, the Nirda (Nucleo investigativo reati a danno degli animali) and the Nas (Nuclei anti sofisticazione), just as last December we had reported the conditions on another farm supplying the well-known Dop brand, whose subsequent inspections went on to confirm many critical issues. Our formal complaints, however, do not exhaust the purpose of our investigations, which remains to show the consequences of a senseless system of intensive farming and to invite people to make conscious food choices.
In the Consorzio's view, our investigative work is unfair, as it attributes to the body responsibilities that are not its own. Following the release of the first investigation, those responsible at Essere Animali were reported by the Consorzio itself for defamation through the press, and the investigation video was recently taken down from the web by the postal police. It is called a preventive seizure — an order issued pending the relevant investigations — but to us it feels very much like censorship. We all have the right, after all, to form an opinion on such an important matter, not least because it is now clear that these are not isolated cases but a widespread problem that concerns not only the Consorzio del prosciutto di Parma but meat production more generally.
There are nine million pigs farmed in our country, and just under half are destined to become Parma ham. But all of them, or at least the vast majority, are raised in intensive systems. Here, sows are confined for most of their lives in farrowing crates where they live virtually immobilised and are impregnated in a continuous cycle, as though they were a reservoir of piglets. The pigs, meanwhile, grow in groups in fattening pens — bare concrete enclosures stripped of everything — where they quickly come to occupy most of the available floor space. This soon explains why these are not isolated cases, why animals as highly intelligent and sensitive as pigs are treated like machines for an industry that produces ham. And consequently it is up to us to decide what to do. To share the information they want to censor, to rethink our food choices. Because, when all is said and done, that industry produces precisely because there is someone willing to buy.