Animal Liberation Aotearoa : News : Activists Tour Pig Factory Farm

"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.

The first shed we went into was filled with sow crates containing females. These crates were around 60cm wide and each contained a pig that was easily 4 times our size. Every single one had obvious injuries, from scrapes and callousses caused by rubbing against the rusty bars to eyes streaming pus from untreated infections. All were covered in dozens of flies and their feeding troughs were filled with yellow scummy liquid. Many had stood up when we walked in but most quickly went back to lying or kneeling on the bare concrete floor. The severe depression many were suffering from was painfully obvious in the those that didn't even look up as we went past but instead lay staring into the distance.

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 who 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.

To ensure that we also had a positive experience of animals, a month after the Farm Tour we also took a visit to The Sanctuary, just out of Warkworth. We spent the day interacting with rescued animals and learning about them. This was a great experience and quite a contrast to what we had seen a month earlier.

We did not take any animals while we were on the factory farm as it would not have been safe for the people or animals involved. It is also not the point of the tours.

We plan to do more of these visits to different types of farms and would like to involve more people over time. While it cannot be said that it was a good experience we did achieve our goals of giving people a first hand experience of factory farming and of pigs themselves.