This is What Life Inside a Gestation Crate is Like for a Pig
Disclaimer: if you care enough about animals to NOT support the standard method of pig confinement, gestation crates, then you obviously care enough about animals to NOT cause their violent death. Right? (And even if you don’t care, you still have no right to take their bodies and destroy them.) Because acknowledging gestation crates are cruel must be met with the agreement that violent killing is even more cruel. This globally-standard monopoly of confinement didn’t always exist – it was birthed from a small-farm, roaming attitude “model” designed to maximize profits in limited space.
As long as animals are exploited, so too will humans design more efficient ways to exploit them.
The ONLY humane is to reject the system that requires their suffering and violent death by being vegan. SL
Source One Green Planet
Gestation crates have become the center of much controversy in recent years. These crates are designed to house sows on factory farms in a manner that allows pork companies to continuously breed and produce in a “highly efficient” manner. These crates are so small a pig will never get the chance to turn around for their entire lives, let alone see their own tails. The sad truth is 95 percent of pork in the United States comes from pigs raised in a factory farm. It is no wonder that animal activists are fighting for a ban of these cruel crates. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), “Gestation stalls were developed as a way to make efficient use of space and keep expenses low while preserving good nutrition and health of individual sows.” So if raising pigs in a gestation crate is considered to be the most efficient method of producing “healthy,” cost-effective commodities even by veterinary standards, why would or should pork industries change? Well … perhaps there’s a bit more to the story.
To get a better idea of what life is like for a pig in a gestation crate, let’s imagine for a second…
It’s dark, and the air is filled with repugnant smells and piercing echoes of screaming. But these types of conditions are all you have ever known – they’re normal. What’s that smell? It’s your own waste, piling up underneath you. Breathing is a challenge. Moment after moment passes. But you don’t know how long it’s been because there’s no way of knowing time when you’re confined behind dark, cold walls, staring at metal bars pressing up against your soft nose. What could be behind you? Who knows. Those bars are so constricting that you’ll never have the opportunity to turn around. Lying down is hard enough, but sometimes you just can’t stay on your feet because the unnatural slatted concrete floors cause your legs immense pain. You might already have arthritis and you’re only two years old.
You don’t know who you are, but you can imagine you are doomed to the same hopeless future as the hundreds of other individuals surrounding you.
The Typical Experience of a Gestation Crate Sow
Can you even imagine living one day with these conditions? This is not fiction. This is real. This is the life of an artificially inseminated soon-to-be mother pig confined in a gestation crate, where she spends the majority of her existence (besides the time she spends in a farrowing crate – Read more about it.) Sows in gestation crates are typically bred 5 to 7 times in their lives to produce piglets that will be slaughtered before 6 months of age. When a sow’s breeding production declines, her life, too, is brutally ended. And for what? Well, cheap, “convenient” pork, produced in a manner that allows industrial farms to make maximized profits.
Housing pigs in gestation crates allows farmers to mass produce these animals within an indoor environment. Many dominant farming systems (called “Megafarms”) contain over 10,000 breeding sows per unit, some with over 100,000 in one location. The pigs are kept in separate crates, so that they can’t tear each other apart from frustration due to intense confinement. However, they are still mutilated by having their tails cut off (called docking) and their ears tagged for identification. Separation also allows for workers to more conveniently manage individuals.
Pigs kept in gestation crates generally weigh between 600 and 900 pounds. So, a pregnant pig weighing a little over 800 pounds would be about 5.6 feet long and have a girth (circumference) of 5.7 feet. Her gestation crate measures 6.6 feet long with a width of 2.2 feet. Now imagine that…take a look at life from within a gestation crate.
Download Your FREE Vegan PDF HERE
Order a FREE vegan kit HERE
Dairy-Free Info HERE
Take the Dairy-Free Challenge HERE
Click HERE for more Dairy-Free
Fish alternatives can be found HERE
Learn about eggs HERE
Find bacon alternatives HERE and HERE
Take PETA’s Cruelty-Free Shopping Guide along with you next time you head to the store! The handy guide will help you find humane products at a glance. Order a FREE copy HERE
Searching for Cruelty-Free Cosmetics, Personal-Care Products, Vegan Products, or more?
Click HERE to search.
Free PDF of Vegan & Cruelty-Free Products/Companies HERE
Click HERE to find out How to Wear Vegan!
Want to do more than go vegan? Help others to do so! Click below for nominal, or no, fees to vegan literature that you can use to convince others that veganism is the only compassionate route to being an animal friend:
PETA HERE
Vegan Outreach HERE
Get your FREE Activist Kit from PETA, including stickers, leaflets, and guide HERE
Have questions? Click HERE
For the heartless monsters out there
Who think this is just fine
Pigs are pigs
But man is the swine!!!
Our Compass 
For the heartless monsters out there
Who think this is just fine
Pigs are pigs
But man is the swine!!!
LikeLiked by 1 person
There is something missing, a void, in people who know yet who continue supporting such incalculable suffering. Thank you, hon, perfect as always. ❤
LikeLiked by 1 person
You are so very welcome and thank you ❤️
LikeLike