Torture, for Cheap Meat

As most of you know, Nicole and I are ethical vegans and were established animal-liberation activists before we launched HW in 2013. That is why this appeared on our website from the start: “While our focus here is on a single industry and a single species, Horseracing Wrongs stands against all animal exploitation. We hold that no animal should be bred, domesticated, and used for human purposes. The fundamental wrong, as we see it, lies in animal property; as long as we continue to own them, talk of “rights” is positively meaningless. Accordingly, we are not interested in reform or so-called welfare improvements – simply an end, to horseracing, to all of it.”

Today, I briefly pivot from horses to advocate for another suffering species. An amendment to the 2026 federal farm bill would nullify welfare improvements for pigs (and other animals) that had been approved by large, bipartisan, citizen (ballot measures) majorities in states like California and Massachusetts. It is called “Save Our Bacon” and if enacted would bring back/entrench unspeakable horrors to untold millions of pigs.

SOB has passed the House and is now in the Senate. What follows is a May 30 NY Times piece by the animal-friendly columnist Nicholas Kristof. After reading, please ask your senators to not only oppose SOB but to lobby their colleagues as well.

(I’ve edited slightly for brevity. At the bottom, is a reminder of what we are dealing with here – specifically, the wondrous intelligence of our porcine cousins.)

“We raised pigs for a time on our family farm in Oregon when I was a teenager, and they had stronger personalities than some of my human friends.

“While some of our pigs were friendly, docile or ingratiating, one sow named Brunhilda was grumpy, vocal and very strong-willed. But she was a devoted mom, constantly checking on her piglets and leading them around our farm – while showing them how to be independent-minded, too.

“Nobody would have mistaken Brunhilda for a saint, but nobody could forget her, either. Exasperating as she was, I would never have punished her by locking her in a cage so small, she couldn’t turn around. That sounds like torture to me.

“And to many people, it seems. One poll found that 84 percent of Americans considered it unacceptable for pregnant sows to be kept in tiny cages called gestation crates – as is routine on American factory farms today. Voters in California passed a ballot measure in 2018 by a 63 percent majority, as did Massachusetts voters in 2016 by a 78 percent majority, to improve treatment of farm animals and, in particular, to ban the sale of pork from hog operations that tightly confine hogs in this way.

“The pork industry…repeatedly filed lawsuits to block these referendums but lost in the Supreme Court. So having failed both at the ballot box and in the courts, the industry pulled a fast one.

“It added a provision, Save Our Bacon, to this year’s farm bill in the House of Representatives to block these state laws as well as any similar future state efforts to improve pig welfare. ‘U.S. pork producers need a farm bill that protects American farmers from California’s overreach,’ protests the National Pork Producers Council. It complains that it is unfair that the California law applies to pork from pigs raised in other states but sold in California.

“The farm bill with the Save Our Bacon provision passed the House of Representatives. Now it’s up to the Senate and the eventual congressional conference committee to decide whether to include this provision, which aims – this is my telegraphic version – to suppress the will of voters so that giant meat companies can abuse pigs. Some senators are backing away from Save Our Bacon, but others are expected to push to include it. Enactment of this provision would mark a substantial setback for animal rights in America’s livestock gulag.

“Fortunately, at a time when Americans can’t seem to agree on anything else, animal rights are a rare issue on which many conservatives and liberals periodically find common ground. In 2005, American Conservative magazine had a cover showing confined pigs and a cover line that read, ‘Why conservatives should care about animal cruelty.’ Left and right may fight over immigrant rights, women’s rights or L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but many of us do agree on pig rights.

“Prominent conservatives like Tomi Lahren, Mike Cernovich and Laura Ingraham have stood firm against this provision. Cernovich called it ‘demonic,’ and Lahren referred to it in a way that is unprintable here. A number of Republican House members, led by Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, have challenged the measure in Congress.

“Opposition to the provision isn’t just about pig well-being. Some conservatives object to this effort to overturn the will of voters. Others note that the largest pork producer in America is Smithfield, now owned by a Chinese company, and they wonder why Congress would privilege a Chinese behemoth over the American electorate.

“For me, the prime concern is animal cruelty. To confine animals in stinking cages, so many never see the sun or touch earth, is to deny their very nature. The ethos was described in a 1976 article in Hog Farm Management that said: ‘Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory.’

“The hog industry now argues that this system is actually good for pigs, protecting them from predators and cold and heat. ‘So our animals can’t turn around for the 2.5 years that they are in the stalls producing piglets,’ a pork producers spokesman said in 2012. ‘I don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around.’

“The stakes of the Save Our Bacon provision are enormous, for more than 120 million hogs are slaughtered in the United States each year. That is approximately equivalent to the human populations of California, Texas, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania put together and means that roughly four pigs are slaughtered every second, on average, around the clock.

“We tolerate cruelty toward pigs, I think, because the suffering is largely invisible and we see pigs as an undifferentiated mass rather than as Brunhildas with emotions, just like our own pets. Many Americans are ambivalent, not wanting animals to suffer unnecessarily yet also wanting inexpensive and tasty meat. The trade-offs are real, for the pork industry indeed excels at producing cheap sausage, but think of your dog enduring what pigs face, and you realize that the moral cost is incalculable.”

Thank you, Mr. Kristof.

Over the past few decades, we have learned more about the animal mind – its cognitive and emotional capacities alike – than the whole of previous recorded history. This relatively new knowledge should, alone, force us to reassess how we view – and more to the point, treat – the rest of the animal kingdom.

That pigs are among the most intelligent species on the planet is beyond dispute. But increasingly we’re learning exactly how intelligent they are.

A 2009 study found that “pigs [can] learn what a mirror image represents and use it to obtain information.” From the summary: “When put in a pen with a mirror in it, young pigs made movements while apparently looking at their image. After 5 hours spent with a mirror, the pigs were shown a familiar food bowl, visible in the mirror but hidden behind a solid barrier. Seven out of eight pigs found the food bowl in a mean of 23 seconds by going away from the mirror and around the barrier.

“To use information from a mirror and find a food bowl, each pig must have observed features of its surroundings, remembered these and its own actions, deduced relationships among observed and remembered features and acted accordingly. This ability indicates assessment awareness in pigs.”

A 2019 study found that pigs use tools: “Here, we report the first structured observations of umprompted instrumental object manipulation in a pig…which we argue qualifies as tool use.”

And perhaps most impressive, a 2021 paper reports “that despite dexterity and visual constraints, pigs have the capacity to acquire a joystick-operated video-game task” – using, mind you, only their snouts and mouths. The lead author on the study, Dr. Candace Croney, in a Gizmodo article: “What they were able to do is perform well above chance at hitting these targets. And well enough above chance that it’s very clear they had some conceptual understanding of what they were being asked to do.”

She added: “We’ve known for ages that pigs could do all sorts of learning and problem-solving. Any farmer can tell you this, and many scientists have demonstrated it. What’s different here…is that the pigs had to grasp the very difficult concept that the thing they were manipulating (the joystick) was having its effect on a 2-dimensional computer-generated image (the cursor) that they could not touch, smell or interact with directly. That sort of conceptual learning is a huge mental leap for any animal, as this would never happen in the real world.”

Dr. Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and expert on mammalian cognition and intelligence, said: “[T]hey clearly understood the connection between their own behavior, the joystick, and what was happening on the screen. It really is a testament to their cognitive flexibility and ingenuity that they were able to find ways to manipulate the joystick despite the fact that the test setup was often difficult for them to engage with physically. What makes these findings even more important is that the pigs in this study displayed self-agency, which is the ability to recognize that one’s own actions make a difference.”