Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin & Catherine Johnson

Author:Temple Grandin & Catherine Johnson [Grandin, Temple & Johnson, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dogs
ISBN: 9780151014897
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Intensification of the Pig Industry and the Problems for Pigs

Raising hogs for market is not an easy job. Fifty years ago, farmers kept their pigs outdoors in dirt lots with simple lean-to shelters or sheds to protect them in bad weather. This setup worked fine if the soil was sandy and the drainage was good, and it was good for the pigs' mental welfare because they were physically free and could root around in the soil and mud. But there's not very much sandy soil in the Carolinas and the Midwest, where most pig farms are now located. Pigs' natural rooting behavior combined with normal rainfall and snowmelt made traditional pig farms into ankle-deep mud-pie messes half the year unless the pigs were housed on large pastures.

The solution farmers came up with was to move their pigs onto concrete lots enclosed in open-sided or three-walled structures. That got rid of the mud problem, but it created a new problem, which was removal of the manure and straw. Shoveling out the lean-tos was such a big job that it limited the number of pigs a farm could handle.

So, to fix that problem, the small farmers in Iowa and Illinois started building fully enclosed pig barns with automatic feeding troughs and slatted floors to let the pigs' manure fall into a gutter or a big storage pit underneath the facility. Farmers who installed the new system saved on labor because they didn't have to hire people to remove the manure, but the new barns were expensive, so farmers had to raise more pigs to make a profit. Another benefit of bringing pigs indoors is the prevention of trichinosis, because the pigs are less likely to eat infected rodents.

That created a whole new set of problems because farmers started to have litters of pigs year-round instead of raising new piglets outside during the summer. A pig pregnancy lasts three months, three weeks, and three days (that's an old pig farmer's saying), so with early weaning of the piglets a mama pig can have at least two litters a year.4 The winters in the Midwest are brutal, and pigs born in the winter could be lost in snowdrifts in the old system, so the mama pigs had to be kept inside. This led to the invention of gestation stalls where a sow is kept confined during her entire pregnancy. The sow can lie down and stand up, but she cannot turn around. It's like being stuffed into the middle seat of a jam-packed jumbo jet for your whole adult life, and you're not ever allowed out in the aisle.

Also, early weaning means you have to build more expensive nurseries and provide expensive feed to take the place of the sows' milk, which produces more pressure for increasing productivity.

Basically, every time the pig industry comes up with a solution to a problem, the solution costs so much to implement that the industry has to intensify production—raise more pigs on the same amount of land—to stay profitable.

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