Peter Sankoff: Piggery stink emanating from Government's backyard

Photo / Mark Mitchell

Three cheers for Mike King. It must have taken real guts to sneak into a piggery in the dark of night and come face to face with the reality of intensive farming.

It couldn't have been easy or pleasant, after appearing as a pitchman for the pork industry for years, to come out and admit that he'd made a mistake. That he'd been wrong to promote a product that profits off the back of almost unimaginable animal suffering.

The television expose on TVNZ showed what most of us who work with animals already know - that intensively farmed pigs suffer tremendously. The images were horrifying, as usual.

Huge sows trapped in tiny crates screaming, unable to do so much as turn around. Most never even see the sun, and almost all of them are psychologically damaged by the confinement.

How did this type of farming come to be an accepted industry standard? During an interview that formed part of the TVNZ programme, the Minister of Agriculture, David Carter, was asked about the conditions that nearly brought King to tears.

Carter responded that he couldn't condemn the conduct in the abstract, as "the question you need to ask is why any good farmer would put animals in those conditions".

He is correct, of course. Most pigs don't suffer this treatment because farmers are evil, sadistic or lazy. They are raised this way because sow stalls and farrowing crates are the most cost-effective way to produce a large number of animals. As crazy as it might sound, that's not merely an industry rationalisation for the treatment, but a legal justification built into our Animal Welfare Act, the legislation supposedly designed to stop, or at least reduce, animal suffering.

While the act uses high-minded terminology, suggesting that we abolish practices that are "inhumane" or constitute "ill-treatment", the reality is that it also allows the minister, in deciding what actually falls into these categories, to consider both the economic needs of farmers and our ever-growing desire for cheap meat.

The unsurprising result is that the abstract meaning of these terms - which, one might imagine, would focus on how much the animals actually suffer - completely disappears once it comes time for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) to approve regulations that dictate the bottom line for animal production, usually with an eye towards what's most cost-effective.

It's a safe bet that just about everything we saw in the horrific footage was legal - done for the purpose of obtaining cheap pork products, fuelled by consumer demand. And masked by a maze of complex regulations designed to make it appear that New Zealand is taking a tough stand on those who "ill-treat" animals when, in reality, we are simply finding ways to entrench it and legitimise established practice.

MAF is understandably uncomfortable with publicly admitting that it condones conduct of the sort witnessed by King on his visit to what was most likely a fairly typical intensive pig farm. It prefers to propound the notion that "ill-treatment" is something practised by rogue farmers gone wild.

And, not surprisingly, Carter has spent the past few days firing salvos at Save Animals from Exploitation (SAFE), which organised the footage of the pig farm, suggesting that the organisation was doing animals a disservice when it went to the media instead of turning over its evidence to MAF.

This smacks of a classic attempt to distract from the real issue. If the minister really wants to find the source of the cruelty seen in the King investigation he doesn't need to go far and he certainly doesn't need SAFE's help. He should sit back and take a close look at his ministry's own regulations. My guess is that the real key to the suffering of pigs lies there.

* Peter Sankoff teaches in the University of Auckland's faculty of law.