Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

by Mark Essig

  But efficiency causes problems for these “units of production.” From standing so long on hard floors, sows develop foot and hoof lesions, a problem that afflicts as much as 80 percent of the sow herd. Behavioral problems are just as widespread. Sows cannot walk or even turn around. They cannot groom themselves or interact with other sows. They can only stand up, lie down, eat, and defecate. With no outlets for natural instincts, they develop what is known as “stereotypic behavior,” such as chewing on the bars of the stall until their mouths bleed. Sows preparing to give birth, who by instinct build nests for their piglets, cannot do so because they have no access to straw. But they keep trying: they swing their heads up and down, back and forth, as if building nests with invisible straw.

  Animals suffered, of course, even under more traditional forms of agriculture. Sows accidentally crushed their piglets and sometimes ate them. Pigs on pasture froze to death during cold snaps. Parasites and infectious diseases were rampant, and hundreds of thousands of hogs died terrible deaths from hog cholera, dysentery, and influenza. Such suffering, while not uncommon, indicated that something was wrong. The problem with confining pigs is that cruelty is built into the system. Tail docking, gestation crates, slatted floors bare of straw: all have been shown to cause suffering. Yet all are standard operating procedure.

  The pig’s plight is well understood but tends to be ignored or rationalized away. “Contemporary swine production systems may create frustration in pigs because of the lack of materials or opportunities to perform certain behaviors,” a group of livestock specialists admit. But then they add a hopeful note: “Pigs display a remarkable ability to adapt their behavior to the husbandry setting.” That is true. If the history of the pig tells us nothing else, it is that these animals can make do just about anywhere, eating just about anything.

  Thus far, however, pigs have failed to adapt to tiny crates, crowded pens, slatted floors, and ammonia-saturated air. Some needs—to build a nest, to root, to nuzzle—should not be denied.

  EIGHTEEN

  “Back to the Start”

  Bernard Rollin, an ethicist at Colorado State University, once gave a speech to a group of pork producers in Ontario, Canada. He was nervous. He had criticized industry practices in a column he wrote for the Canadian Veterinary Journal, but he had never spoken directly to a group of hog farmers. Cattle ranchers, he had found, “cared deeply about how they managed an animal, even if it meant losing money or sleep treating a sick creature.” But cattle raising had preserved many of its traditional methods, while hog production had been thoroughly industrialized.

  Rollin spoke outdoors to two hundred hog farmers gathered around picnic tables. He pointed out that society was becoming increasingly concerned about the treatment of animals in zoos, in circuses, and on farms. He called confinement operations “exploitative”—because they treat animals as unfeeling meat-producing machines—and made the case for an old-fashioned ethics of animal husbandry, which insists that the human partnership with livestock carries moral responsibilities. Animals suffer and deserve compassion, even if that compassion hurts the bottom line. In his talk to the farmers, Rollin says, “I beseeched them to look into themselves, examine what they were doing and see if it accorded with their own ethics.”

  He stopped talking. There was silence for a moment, then applause. Finally one farmer in the audience jumped atop a picnic table. “I have been feeling lousy for fifteen years about how I raise these animals,” the man said. “I am pledging to tear down my confinement barn and build a barn I don’t have to be ashamed of.”

  If that story sounds a bit like a television commercial, that’s because a restaurant chain later created a commercial on a similar theme. Chipotle, which claims to use pork only from pigs raised on pasture or in pens with deep beds of straw, released a two-minute animated film titled Back to the Start in 2011. The story, which has no dialogue, begins with a young farmer, joined by his wife and baby, working a bucolic small farm with pigs on pasture. He then builds an enormous factory where his pigs are pumped full of feed and drugs before being packed into boxes and driven away on big trucks. Finally, as an old man with a grown son, the farmer dismantles the factory and turns it back into a farm, with pigs on pasture once again. On the soundtrack, Willie Nelson sings a Coldplay song: “Science and progress don’t speak as loud as my heart / I’m going back to the start.”

  It’s a heartwarming tale and not untrue: in America and Europe, a growing number of farmers are embracing more traditional forms of agriculture. But that’s only a small slice of the story. In the developing world, especially China and Brazil, farmers are moving in the opposite direction: they are giving up old-fashioned ways and raising pigs in confinement barns because they can make a lot of money doing so. In only the latest controversy in the long history of swine, some people are tearing down confinement barns out of ethical concerns as others raise them up for financial reasons. It’s a question of values and prices: How much is a happy pig worth?

  Westerners, on the whole, eat slightly less meat than they used too, but elsewhere the appetite for meat is growing quickly. Meat consumption in the developing world more than doubled between the 1960s and 2000. China and Brazil accounted for nearly all of that growth, and demand is likely to keep rising in the next few decades.

  Production has risen to meet this global demand. In developed countries—the United States, the nations of western Europe, and Japan—the amount of meat produced rose only slightly between 1980 and 2004. During that same period, meat production in the developing world increased by 300 percent, with pigs and poultry recording the biggest gains. The same calculations made in Iowa in 1960 are being made in Brazil today, as grassland and rain forest are destroyed to make way for feed crops: cows need to spend a large part of their lives grazing on grass, but that cow pasture can be plowed under to plant corn and soy as feed for pigs and chickens, a process that produces more meat on less land.

  Thanks to genetically modified seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, crop production has boomed, and feed prices have dropped: in constant dollars, corn and soy cost about half as much as they did in 1961. Cheap grain flows around the world on ships, destined for the stomachs of pigs and poultry. Chicken production has risen fastest because religious prohibitions do not limit its consumption, but pork production has nearly kept pace, thanks largely to China.

  China has a pork-based cuisine, a population of 1.3 billion people, and a growing middle class that now earns enough to eat meat regularly. That’s why the government maintains a strategic pork reserve, consisting of both live pigs and frozen pork. It functions much like the federal oil reserve in the United States: in times of shortage, China releases pork onto the market to stabilize prices and prevent social upheaval.

  Though China is still largely self-sufficient in pork, this won’t stay true for long as demand increases. Part of the solution lies abroad: in 2013 the Chinese meat producer Shuanghui International paid nearly $5 billion to buy Smithfield Foods, America’s dominant pork producer. At the same time, Archer Daniels Midland and other commodities firms have spent more than $10 billion buying up grain traders in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere, so that they can sell crops to China. Once a leading exporter of soybeans, China is now the leading importer, buying more than half of the world’s supply. Those foreign soybeans do not get turned into tofu; they become pork.

  Chinese pork production is in the midst of vast modernization. As recently as the 1980s, small farmers who raised fewer than five pigs a year produced more than 95 percent of the China’s pork. Two decades later, that figure had dropped to less than 25 percent. The small farmers are efficient, relying on thousands of years of agricultural wisdom, but they can’t keep up with the nation’s meat hunger. Pigs, once fed on weeds and rice bran, now eat imported corn and soy, mixed with supplements and antibiotics. Their manure, once used to fertilize rice paddies, now poses a pollution hazard. Genetic divers
ity—represented by more than one hundred local pig breeds—is being displaced by Western hybrids with the same genetic lines that can be found in North Carolina and Brazil.

  As China grows richer and hungrier for meat, it is abandoning traditional small-scale production and embracing confinement barns. Traditional Chinese pig breeds, like these Meishan, are giving way to hybrids indistinguishable from those found in the United States. (Keith Weller; courtesy of the US Department of Agriculture)

  In three decades, China has experienced a transformation of diet and agriculture that took a couple of centuries in the United States and Europe. Western nations, meanwhile, are entering a new phase of their agricultural history, one in which consumers seek a balance between an appetite for cheap meat and the qualms of conscience—a balance that some try to maintain by understanding the innate needs of pigs.

  In the late 1970s Alex Stolba and David Wood-Gush, scientists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, built a multiacre “pig park” that included a small pine forest, gorse bushes, pastures, a stream, and some boggy ground. Then they bought standard commercial pigs—one adult male, four adult females, a juvenile male, and a juvenile female—and set them loose. The scientists studied the pigs as if they were little-understood, exotic creatures, which, in a sense, they were. Although pigs had lived in great intimacy with humans for 10,000 years, much basic information about their instincts had gone unrecorded.

  The researchers put a scientific polish on facts swineherds had known for millennia. The pigs at the Edinburgh pig park were most active in morning and evening, resting at night and in the middle of the day. Most activity—rooting, eating, nuzzling—involved the snout, the pig’s key interface with the world. On some days pigs spent more than six to eight hours rooting and foraging. The pigs rubbed their faces against tree trunks, marking them with scents from glands in the face, and other pigs later visited the trees to sniff out the messages left behind, much as dogs do with markings left by urine. The pigs also formed complex social bonds: females from the same litter tended to stick together long after weaning, and piglets maintained bonds with their mother even after she’d given birth to her next litter. Unknown pigs introduced into the park found themselves harassed and excluded for months before finally being allowed into the herd.

  The pigs slept in a communal nest, which each pig would help to refresh nightly with new mouthfuls of grass and straw. They built several nests over the course of the study, and all had certain things in common: the nests were distant from the feeding sites, offered a wide, clear view of any approaches—the better to spy oncoming predators—and were protected on at least one side from the chill wind. Upon first arising in the morning, the pigs walked at least twenty feet away before urinating or defecating.

  In the hours before giving birth, a pregnant sow would choose her own private nest site, far from the communal nest, and then gather material, picking up sticks and straw, cropping grass with her teeth, and arranging it for warmth and comfort. After farrowing, she would not allow any other pigs to approach for several days. With gentle grunts and nudges from her snout, she assembled the piglets on one side of the nest, then moved a few feet away before lying down. Only then would the piglets move alongside her to nurse. Piglets ventured out of the nest after five days or so, and they weaned themselves at three or four months.

  After their pig-park study, Stolba and Wood-Gush concluded that the pigs’ behavior “resembled that of the European wild boar.” Domestic pigs, that is, reverted to their wild ways once given a bit of room to roam. Given what we know about feral pigs, this is not surprising. A few million years of evolutionary history easily override a few thousand years of domestication.

  The pig park and many behavioral studies that followed showed just what was wrong with confinement barns. Pigs need materials to manipulate—wood chips or straw at the very least—or they will use their snouts and teeth to hurt themselves or each other. Keeping pigs in family groups is wise because they’re more likely to fight with outsiders. The sow’s nest-building instinct is strong and should not be denied. Studies also determined that there is a genetic component to maternal behavior. This should shock no one: mothers who don’t crush their piglets will pass along their genetic materials more successfully. If breeders selected for maternal abilities as well as rapid weight gain, farrowing crates would not be necessary.

  It was no coincidence that the pig park study took place in the United Kingdom, which since the nineteenth century has been at the forefront of the fight for animal welfare. In the modern era the seminal work has been Ruth Harrison’s 1964 Animal Machines, a graphic critique of industrial livestock farming that galvanized Great Britain’s animal rights movement, much as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped create modern environmentalism in the United States. In response to Animal Machines, the British government formed the Brambell Commission “to enquire into the welfare of animals kept under intensive livestock husbandry systems.” The inquiry uncovered appalling conditions and declared that, at the very least, farm animals should have enough room to “stand up, lie down, turn around, groom themselves and stretch their limbs.”

  These modest requirements became known as the “five freedoms,” a sort of bill of rights for livestock. A group called the Farm Animal Welfare Council later revised the five freedoms, arguing that animals should enjoy “1. Freedom from hunger and thirst. 2. Freedom from discomfort. 3. Freedom from pain, injury, or disease. 4. Freedom to express normal behavior. 5. Freedom from fear and distress.” These recommendations carried no legal weight, but they proved influential throughout Europe.

  The European Union (EU) has been the most powerful agent of change in the conditions under which modern livestock live or die. In 1997 an EU veterinary committee issued a 190-page report titled “The Welfare of Intensively Kept Pigs.” It was a measured document, sensitive not only to the humane treatment of pigs but also to the economic interests of farmers. It nonetheless came to damning conclusions about pig farming, and as a result the EU issued mandatory new standards. Europe required that pigs have access to larger areas of solid flooring for more comfortable lying and standing and that the gaps in slatted floors be narrowed to minimize foot injuries. Sows had to have constant access to materials for rooting. The farthest-reaching provision banned the use of gestation crates: instead of tiny individual stalls, all sows had to be housed in groups. Canada, too, has since ordered that gestation crates be phased out.

  Promoting farm animal welfare has proved more difficult in the United States, a country generally suspicious of government regulation. Private groups, however, have had some success, especially with efforts to restrict gestation crates. In 2008 the Pew Charitable Trusts, a prominent nonprofit, issued a harsh report on modern livestock farming that called for banning gestation crates because they “restrict the natural movement and normal behaviors of animals.” The Humane Society became the most active campaigner, releasing detailed reports and alarming photos and videos. “Gestation crates are a real problem,” said animal scientist Temple Grandin, who is widely respected within the livestock industry. “Basically you’re asking a sow to live in an airline seat.” The images of large animals jammed into tiny pens called to mind earlier activism against crated veal calves—a campaign so successful that veal became almost taboo. A number of US states have banned gestation crates, but none of them are major hog producers.

  Change in the United States is less likely to happen through government intervention than through corporate buying power, as businesses respond to growing consumer repulsion over gestation crates. Burger King in 2007 became the first major restaurant chain to announce it would require its suppliers to phase out the crates, and many others followed suit, including McDonald’s, Denny’s, and Cracker Barrel. Retailers and wholesalers—Kroger, Costco, Sodexo, and more—announced similar moves. Under pressure from these major buyers, Smithfield and its rivals Hormel and Cargill announced that t
hey would shift away from gestation crates, but only very gradually. Early in 2014, Smithfield promised to be crate-free by 2022, to give its farmers time to make the switch.

  Industry spokesmen tend to respond to animal welfare concerns with a mix of resignation and contempt. They insist that gestation crates are humane but agree to comply with their customers’ demands: if McDonald’s wants to buy crate-free pork, then Smithfield will produce it. “Their feelings aren’t rational,” an executive with an American meat company said of consumers, “but they are important.” In the words of one European official, “One must concede the right of choice to the buyer, even when such a choice involves an element of gimmick and charade.”

  Thanks to legal changes in Europe and consumer pressure in the United States, confinement hog operations are making minor modifications to their current methods. Instead of being contained in gestation crates, more sows are living in group pens. Instead of bare, slatted concrete floors, they have areas of solid flooring and some straw. The changes are significant, but for some they aren’t enough. The EU, for instance, has a stricter standard for “organic” pork, which prohibits tail docking, teeth clipping, and growth-boosting drugs and also requires organically grown feed and access to outdoor space. Producers in Denmark have created a special category called the “welfare pig”—a phrase that would carry rather different connotations in the United States—in which the animals are kept in conditions that split the difference between organic and conventional. Similar standards in the United Kingdom qualify a pig as “Freedom Food,” a labeling effort that has found broad success, including a commitment from the British arm of McDonald’s to buy only pork that meets the standard.