Farm Tours

Since mid 2008 Animal Liberation Aotearoa (ALA) has been taking people on tours of various factory farms.

People do not often get to see behind the closed doors of the nations factory farms and there is only so much you can convey about these farms with talks, film screenings and workshops. Visiting these farms enables people to see, smell and hear the miserable reality of life for millions of animals.

The main reason for carrying out Farm Tours is that many activists will never get to see factory farms, vivisection labs or slaughter houses for themselves. It is important, not only for their own education, but also so that activists can feel the animal’s pain and suffering personally and feel more compelled to fight for their liberation. People come and go from the movement. This will be for many reasons but part of it is that activists never really interact with animals, either suffering or rescued. They start to become detached from those they are fighting for and feel like the time, effort and money that they put into activism is a waste. Seeing factory farms is a powerful experience and completely different to that of seeing it on a screen or reading about it. It is not an experience that will be easily forgotten.

How Do These Farm Tours Work?

First of all ALA find a suitable farm to visit. By suitable we mean somewhere that is likely to be unlocked and somewhere that is not hard to access.

After this we hold a workshop open to whoever wants to come on the tour. At these workshops we discuss the particular industry that we will be visiting so that the people coming have some idea of what to expect. We also discuss the actual tour, times, location etc... so that everyone is happy and clear on what is happening. The final thing we discuss is potential legal implications and what could happen if we get caught. (Incidentally we did get caught on our Meet Your Meat Farm Tour in January ‘09 and we were just asked to leave so it was rather uneventful, though it may not always be that way.)

Then a few days later we visit the farm. We are usually on site for about 15 - 30 minutes. During this time people have a look around, take pictures and discuss what we are seeing.

Palmerston North Pig Farm Tour

May 09

On the 8th of June Massey University are holding an 'Advancing Pork Production' seminar for the Pork Board at the Kingsgate Hotel in Palmerston North. We thought this would be a good opportunity to let the public see, first hand, the suffering that 'Pork Production' really entails.

This Queens Birthday weekend we successfully held a Farm Tour at a pig farm close to Palmerston North. We say successfully because the Pork Board did try and stop the tour through several different means including using Private Investigators and attending our organising workshop. These actions by the Pork Board say a lot about how desperate they are to prevent further exposure of their industry.

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Meet Your Meat Farm Tour

January 09

In recognition of the first World Day for the Abolition of Meat we took a handful of interested and concerned people to an Auckland pig farm and attempted to go to a broiler farm near by.

The pig farm we visited only had the fattening pens; these are where young piglets are kept until they are about five months old when they are sent to slaughter. The pens were dark and damp and every surface was covered in pig excrement; as were the piglets themselves. Naturally pigs are very clean and would have a dunging area separate to where they sleep, eat and play. In these pens this is impossible for the young pigs.

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Battery Hen Farm Tour

December 08

Nearly 20 people went to a South Auckland factory farm to see first hand how battery hens in Aotearoa are living. For many this was the first time they had been to a factory farm but it was something they needed to see, despite the risk.

Alana, who came on the tour, said ‘I wanted to go because I knew that seeing a battery hen farm myself, would enable me to explain better to others what they are like. I felt that people would believe me more if I had personally experienced being in one. I also felt like I was at the stage where I wanted to take a more hands on approach to helping animals, rather than just collecting money etc... so this was the first step for me towards that goal.'

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Pig Farm Tour

June 08

"Nothing I had read or seen could have led me to imagine how horrific this pig farm was. The noise and being surrounded by huge animals separated from you by a few bars at times overwhelmed all other senses and I found I had to block out the suffering of individual pigs to be able to move throughout the sheds." - an activist on the farm tour

In Aotearoa there are over 350,000 pigs on factory farms; most destined to be eaten. They live in filthy crammed conditions, unable to display of their natural behaviours such as foraging, nesting, forming hierarchies and in many cases even turning around. In 2005 over 750,000 pigs were slaughtered for their flesh. This is hard to believe and something we had to see for ourselves.

On a sunny winter day in June we took a ‘self guided' tour of a North Island pig farm. The point of this farm tour was to see, with our own eyes, how pigs were factory farmed in this country and to gain a better understanding of pigs in general.

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