Remember Mother Pigs This Mother’s Day

This Mother's Day, animal protection advocates hope that when we pay homage to our own mothers, we also choose to show compassion to mothers of a different species: factory-farmed pigs.

About pigs, Dr. Donald Broom of the Cambridge University Veterinary School says: "They have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly three-year-olds."

Yet despite their intelligence, mother pigs, or sows, suffer immensely in industrialized animal agribusiness facilities, enduring rapid cycles of impregnation, delivery, and nursing, all while intensively confined. During their four-month pregnancies, 60 to 70 percent are kept in barren "gestation crates"—individual metal stalls two feet wide by seven feet long, so small the animals can’t even turn around.

Gestation crates for mother pigs have already been outlawed in Sweden and the United Kingdom, and the European Union is phasing them out effective 2013. Florida voters made their state the first in the nation to ban this inhumane but standard agribusiness practice when they passed a ballot initiative in 2002. Yet despite their inherent cruelty, gestation crates are still used throughout the U.S. pork industry, forcing pregnant pigs to languish in these unbearably confining stalls.

Just before giving birth, the sows are moved into equally restrictive "farrowing crates," stalls designed to separate the mother pig from her nursing piglets. Farrowing crates are so small that sows are able only to stand up and lie down in them. After the piglets are weaned—prematurely—the cycle begins again for the mother pig, who averages 2.1 to 2.5 litters each year. Once they can no longer reproduce efficiently, the sows are sent to slaughter.

On factory farms, sows are never able to be the attentive, caring mothers they are naturally. Instead, they are treated as mere piglet-producing machines. And, as the economic interests of the producer often conflict with—and generally take priority over—the animals’ well-being, their welfare is severely compromised by modern industrialized farming practices.

This Mother’s Day, we think of those sows and other "mother" farm animals. Please join us in our efforts to make their lives better.

See the Video

Confinement by Crate

Gestation Crates: A Sow's Life

Related Links

Think Outside the Crate Campaign

About Pigs

An HSUS Report: The Welfare of Animals in the Meat, Egg, and Dairy Industries