“Thumping” a piglet isn’t pretty. For those who don’t know what it is, it’s the way piglets are commonly killed in Canadian hog barns. If a piglet is sick, injured or for some other reason is going to be put down, it is generally picked up by its hind legs, swung quickly up and over a worker’s or farmer’s head and smacked down into the barn’s concrete floor.
It looks terrible. But according to almost all vets, it’s the fastest, most effective and most humane way to kill a piglet. The piglet doesn’t know what is happening because it all takes place within the space of about two seconds. If done correctly, the piglet experiences immediate death and zero pain.
Read Also
Proactive approach best bet with looming catastrophes
The Pan-Canadian Action Plan on African swine fever has been developed to avoid the worst case scenario — a total loss ofmarket access.
There are different ways to kill a piglet that don’t look as brutal. They can be gassed, but they need to be hauled to a gas chamber somewhere for that, and that’s a pretty stressful thing for a piglet, and the gases used can be unpleasant and upsetting as they take affect.
There are also devices like the “Zephyr,” a piglet skull smashing device developed at the University of Guelph, in which is piglet is held on the floor and killed. That no doubt takes longer than thumping, so could be more stressful, but doesn’t look bad if captured on a secret camera or on somebody’s cellphone cam and put up on Youtube.
Ditto with putting down a sow that’s injured. It can given an overdose of barbituates, but that can be upsetting to the animal as they take hold, plus they have to be applied by a vet, so there can be a delay of hours or days to get a vet out to the barn to kill the pig. Gassing is also unpleasant and upsetting to a grown pig.
I’m talking about this issue obviously because of the sensationalistic piece run by W5 on the weekend, and by the campaign launched by a vegetarian activist using a hidden camera. The W5 piece contained much inflammatory commentary and interpretation, as did Mercy For Animals’ statements yesterday. Much of that commentary and spinning of the story was picked up by the Winnipeg local media and amplified, so it became the story for most people.
Very little coverage in the local media was given to the panel of veterinary experts who reviewed the footage and concluded most of it was acceptable and showed animals in good condition, with one breach of proper euthanasia methods (the thumping of one piglet was done against a metal pole, not the concrete floor), some unacceptable ear-pulling and kicking of a downed sow, and a disrespectful tone towards the animals in a couple of the handpicked clips.
The main conclusion of the panel, organized by the Center For Food Integrity, was that “while some of the animal handling practices shown are improper, most of what is seen are widely considered acceptable and humane.”
To me, as a journalist who’s been around pigs for a couple of decades and been into quite a few barns, the animals shown in this barn seemed generally healthy, active, appeared to be curious and were excited by the barn worker coming up to them. Hardly an image of massive abuse, other than a couple of improper actions that were the grand total of more than two months of secret surveillance.
But that probably won’t matter, because the spin out of the activist group was that the stuff in the barn was OUTRAGEOUS AND INHUMANE, and that became the story.
To me that raises the question of how livestock producers and other farmers should deal with and adapt to an era in which everybody has a cellphone camera and well-funded activist groups are always seeking something they can torque-up in order to help to raise even more money and push an anti-meat agenda. (The people behind this campaign admit they want to end meat-eating.) All sorts of unpleasant but acceptable stuff can be edited and presented in a way that can make farmers look very bad. With the general population getting further and further from farm origins, the disconnection between agricultural reality and urban perceptions of idyllic old-time farms will create a greater and greater chance of outrage eruptions when urban moms see images of animals being put down, being castrated or dehorned, etc. That’s not going to go away.
So how do farmers adapt to an era of omnipresent cellphone cameras, activist groups looking to outrage, and an urban population unused to the gritty reality of real farming?
I don’t know. You tell me.
(By the way, if I sound like a a callous, hard-hearted person who doesn’t care about animals, you should know that tomorrow I’m going to be spending $2,000 on an operation for my 12 year old dog, and that I actually love pigs. Pigs are my favorite livestock. For years I have supported moving the industry to open housing of gestating sows because I think it’s both practically possible and nicer for the pigs.)
