Pork producer uncages some pigs

Smithfield Foods will gradually stop keeping breeding sows in tight spaces

The breeding sows are lined up like parked cars, in cages so small that their flanks come close to touching the bars on either side. They spend most of their lives in these 2-foot by 7-foot spaces, unable to turn, bearing litter after litter of piglets.

This is where life begins for the animals that end up as bacon or ham on grocery store shelves.

But the practice of keeping breeding pigs in tiny cages has become controversial -- and some say it is on its way out.

In late January, Smithfield Foods, the country's largest pork company and owner of millions of pigs in North Carolina, announced that it will phase out the crates. Over the next 10 years, the company will move to a system where most of its 1.2 million breeding sows can run around in group pens. A major Canadian pork producer, Maple Leaf Foods, followed suit last week.

The move won't change conditions for the vast majority of the 60 million pigs raised in the United States, most on corporate farms that house the animals in crowded concrete and metal barns.

Still, animal rights activists say it is the beginning of a shift that will lessen the suffering of some animals that produce dinner.

"The pigs in these cages are intelligent animals," said Paul Shapiro, head of the factory farming campaign for the Humane Society of the United States. "They have nothing to do except for drink water and eat food when it's placed in front of them, so what they do is they go insane."

Smithfield doesn't acknowledge that the crates are inhumane. Company officials say that abandoning them was a simple business decision, prompted by requests from major customers such as McDonald's.

The Humane Society, the country's largest animal rights group, has mounted a national campaign to draw attention to caged farm animals, including veal calves, egg-laying hens and breeding sows. It has pushed many restaurants to take a closer look at farming practices.

Fighting factory farms

Some are now avoiding all meat that was raised on so-called factory farms, where animals live crowded in barns and are often fed antibiotics. Health advocates have raised concerns in recent years that widespread use of antibiotics in animal production is leading to resistant strains of bacteria, which can attack humans as well as animals. In addition, practices such as cutting off pigs' tails or shearing hens' beaks are routine.

"It's not even close to enough" improvement for the animals, Ashley Christensen, chef at the Raleigh restaurant Enoteca Vin, said of Smithfield's move. "I'm sure they're throwing it out there as something positive, but it seems pretty obvious to me that that was never a good practice."

However, many in the pork industry paint a different picture of the crates.

"If I was a pig, I'd rather be in a crate." said Bundy Lane, who keeps 4,800 Smithfield sows on his Gates County farm. "These pigs kill. It's the survival of the fittest in their world. We've just learned to protect them from themselves."

He says his sows spend their days lying peacefully in their cages. They get plenty of rest, plenty to eat and are almost never injured.

Benefits of crates

Because they can't turn around, their waste falls neatly through the slatted floor under their back feet and never contaminates the food trough that runs through the fronts of the cages.

And the animals are safely contained when it's time to artificially inseminate the sows. That is how pigs conceive on most large farms.

By contrast, Lane said, pigs in pens are constantly jockeying for dominance, fighting for food and wallowing in their own waste.

Veterinarians say that if the animals were stressed by the pens, they wouldn't bear as many piglets. But time has shown that they bear more piglets, and more of them survive, since the crates came into common use more than two decades ago.

"Animals don't experience emotions like people do," said Gene Nemechek, a veterinarian with Genetic Improvement Services, a Newton Grove pork company that uses crates. "I don't know how you can tell whether an animal is happy or not."

Opponents of corporate farms say the issue is simple: forcing an animal to stand in one place for most of its life is cruel.

Cages draw criticism

Paul Willis, a manager for Niman Ranch, a California company that buys pasture-raised pork from small farms all over the country, said pigs have strong instinctual desires to root, to build nests for their young and to socialize with other pigs. Denying them those things, he said, makes them aggressive.

Willis, who raises pigs in Iowa, said his sows conceive naturally and roam between pastures and climate-controlled barns. They establish their own hierarchy, with stronger pigs taking dominant roles, but they never attack or kill one another.

"Pigs are not meant to live on concrete," Willis said, "nor are they meant to live in boxes."