I love eating bacon. I also love pork chops, ham, sausages, pulled pork, and pepperoni. I grew up eating mouth-watering lechón (roasted suckling pig) during gatherings with my Latin American family. However, I have decided not to eat any factory-farmed pig products in the year 2018.
This decision came about while I was fact checking the wild pig encyclopedia article at work. Reading about wild pig behavior led to reading about the behavior of pigs living in factory farms. The difference between the life of a wild pig and the life of a factory pig is extreme.
Let's think for a second about what life is like for a wild piglet. A wild piglet suckles from its mother for 2 to 3 months before it is weaned. The mother keeps her piglets close and fiercely protects them from harm during this time. Wild sows travel in packs with the mothers in the front and rear and the babies in the middle, in order to provide maximum protection. The mothers use their incredible sense of smell to pick out their own babies in the group of piglets.
When a piglet is born in a factory farm, it is allowed only a brief time with its mother. When a small piglet is taken away from its mother, it becomes frightened and desperate for mother's milk. This is why pigs who are kept in factory pens tend to develop the habit of painfully mangling one another's tails. Tail-chewing is a compulsive oral fixation that a piglet develops to replace the mother's teat and to try to assuage its anxiety.
Wild pigs are scavengers that roam vast expanses of land over their lifetimes. They eat a very wide variety of foods, from plant roots to small animals. The unusual shape of their nose may look simply silly or cute to humans, but it actually is specially designed to help them find food underground. The flat end of the nose can be laid flat against the earth while it sniffs. Like many other long-snouted animals, pigs have an EXCELLENT sense of smell. They can smell a tasty tuber or fungus that is several feet below the surface of the earth. If the food is close enough, the pig can also use its snout to "root" or dig it out. Rooting is one of the wild pig's favorite activities, and it will spend much of its life doing this.
In a factory farm, a pig never has the chance to root in its entire life. This is because it never sees dirt, or even sunlight in many cases. It spends its life in a crowded, indoor metal pen with little space to roam, and only cement to walk and rest on. It doesn't get to eat anything but corn (or barley in Europe) after it is taken from its mother. The things that it will smell most in its life are poo, fear, and the dead bodies of other pigs.
There are many, many more horrific and terribly sad aspects of a factory pig's life. I don't plan on becoming vegan (or even vegetarian). Nor do I plan on telling people what they should or shouldn't be eating. I am simply going to pay attention to what, or rather who, I am eating. That piglet that is born into a concrete, fluorescent world is NOT going to live a sick life of fear, anxiety, pain, and discomfort to end up in MY mouth. Not anymore. I want to help that piglet, if I can! Choosing not to give my money to those factories is one of the best things I can do to help.
I will certainly be eating less meat overall, but if I really want to eat pork products, I will make sure they come from happy family-farmed pigs that get to have real lives, like these rooting piglets:
And perhaps by explaining my decision in this post, it might just create a little ripple in the water.