Pig Farming Doesn’t Have to Be This Cruel

"In a little discussed pending US Supreme Court case, National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, the conditions of pork production are being debated. The case is ostensibly about the limits that one state — California — can impose on food production in other states, but it is also about the grim realities of pig farming, which have largely been hidden from a pork-eating public.

Pigs and people once lived on intimate terms. Whereas cattle and sheep lived on pasture outside town, many people kept pigs in backyard sties and came to admire pigs’ intelligence and curiosity. The pig dined on leftovers of family meals, functioning as a sort of edible pet — first coddled, then killed. When her beloved pig was slaughtered, the English author Flora Thompson crawled into bed and cried, but the next day she ate pork gravy. She was just a girl, she wrote, “learning to live in this world of compromises.”

It was a complex relationship, but an honest one. Today, we see pigs mostly on the plate. The life of many pigs, never rosy, has become miserable: They are hidden away in sheds with no dirt to root in, no straw for bedding, and no access to the outdoors. Breeding sows spend much of their lives in tiny pens called gestation crates. At 2 by 7 feet, the crates are barely bigger than the sows, leaving them unable to even turn around. The conditions are such that industry groups have promoted laws that prohibit whistle-blower recordings of how farm animals live.

In 2018, 63 percent of California voters approved Proposition 12, which effectively bans the sale of pork from farms that use gestation crates. The pork industry filed suit to invalidate the law. (Prop. 12 sets standards for the confinement of laying hens and veal calves as well, but those restrictions have proved less controversial.)

Because California imports nearly all of its pork, the law would force farmers in other states to change their practices if they wish to sell there. The court, which will hear arguments in the case this week, must decide whether Prop. 12 violates what is known as the dormant commerce clause, which holds state laws unconstitutional if they place an excessive burden on interstate commerce. But the case also forces us to ask ourselves whether farmers are placing excessive burdens on pigs. The ethics of modern hog farming are on trial.

Although pigs in early America scavenged on city streets and foraged acorns in the woods, by the 1850s most were living on Midwestern farms, grazing on pasture in the summer and gorging on corn in the fall. That was still true a hundred years later.

But in the 1960s, farmers started developing the system of indoor farming that prevails today. Slatted barn floors allow waste to fall into gutters below — eliminating the disagreeable task of manure shoveling. Regular doses of antibiotics promote growth and ward off diseases that accompany confinement. With no room to exercise, pigs require less feed. Packed into barns, they warm each other, lowering heating costs.

Gestation crates, invented in the 1960s and common by the 1990s, follow the same logic. Breeding sows are impregnated through artificial insemination, kept in gestation crates during pregnancy, and then moved to slightly larger farrowing crates to give birth. After the piglets are weaned a few weeks later, the sows receive a fresh tube of semen and are returned to a crate, a cycle that continues until they are injured or become infertile. Then they are slaughtered for sausage, generally at age 2 or 3, never having set foot outdoors.

The crates, their defenders say, keep sows from fighting. Yet, somehow, for thousands of years, farmers managed to profitably raise swine without resorting to solitary confinement.

Sows in crates are prone to pressure sores and lesions. Social creatures, they can’t interact with one another. With no outlets for natural behaviors, they chew on crate bars. Just before giving birth, some move their snouts and legs as if building nests with invisible straw.

“Gestation crates for pigs are a real problem,” the writer and animal scientist Temple Grandin has said. “Basically, you’re asking a sow to live in an airline seat.” In addition to California, nine other states have restricted the use of gestation crates, as has the European Union. Burger King, McDonald’s, and other major companies have requested that their suppliers phase out crates, though implementation has been slow.

Prop. 12 could prompt quicker changes. Under new regulations, each sow must have at least 24 square feet of space, a little less than twice what gestation crates allow. Although most animal rights groups supported the law, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, opposed it, claiming it didn’t go far enough. Prop. 12 won’t solve all the problems of industrial agriculture, and it won’t give sows the lives they deserve as intelligent, social creatures. But it will make a meaningful difference, allowing them some room to walk and interact. It’s a small advance that treats pigs as pigs rather than as mere units of production.

There’s no question that the law would affect interstate commerce. California consumes about 13 percent of the nation’s pork, and few American hog farms currently meet the law’s standards. Prop. 12 is likely to raise pork prices and force changes in supply chains.

But that doesn’t necessarily make it unconstitutional. The dormant commerce clause relies in part on a “balancing test,” weighing the burden to interstate commerce against the benefits that the state derives from the law. The Biden administration has sided with the pork producers, arguing that California has no “legitimate local interest” in how pigs are raised in other states. Californians, though, surely have an interest in how their food is produced.

The American Association of Swine Veterinarians, a group that works closely with the pork industry, quotes an expert arguing that objections to crates are “driven primarily by perception and not science.” But a layperson’s perception is what’s needed: Look at a photo of a gestation barn, with row upon row of sows in tiny cages, and decide whether the science that endorses such practices has lost its way. The California statute requires that pigs have space to “lie down, stand up, fully extend limbs, and turn around freely.” Those are modest requirements for a sentient mammal.

We tolerate modern hog farming because we’re kept in ignorance of it. If we had a chance to look pigs in the eye, we might have trouble looking at ourselves in the mirror.

Mark Essig is the author of Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig."