Dialogue: Worse than a dog's life for factory-farmed pigs

The treatment of pregnant pigs in this country is exceptional only in the degree of suffering it causes, says PAT BASKETT*.

If dogs were treated the same way as thousands of pigs are in this country, the perpetrators would likely be behind bars.

Yet on the list of animal IQs, pigs rate higher than dogs, which are protected by laws that punish people for acts of cruelty.

The difference is that pigs become pork ... and bacon ... and Christmas ham. They exist in our imaginations as commodities. In the description that follows, insert the name of a dog you know and you'll begin to appreciate the life this animal leads.

I'll call her Phoebe because it's the females who get the worst deal.

Phoebe lives in a metal-barred sow crate 60cm wide and 2m long. She can stand up or lie down but not turn round. Sometimes she squats on her haunches - a position that is unnatural to her but which gives some relief to her joints - or she rocks back and forth, hour after hour. When she stops rocking she takes one of the metal bars in her mouth and chews on it.

This occupation takes her mind off her acute anxiety - her inability to make a nest for the offspring to which she is about to give birth. Phoebe's instinct is to use her snout to create a large hollow and line it with leaves and grasses or straw, but the floor of her crate is either concrete or wooden slats.

Other anxieties relieve her terrible urge to nest-build. Phoebe has sparse body hair and is sensitive to temperature extremes.

In warm weather she craves the cooling effect of wet mud because she does not have the sweat glands which help other animals adjust to heat.

The filth gets her down - she hates having to foul the tiny area in which she lives.

A few days before she gives birth, the farmer puts her in a slightly larger cage called a farrowing crate. But she still can't turn round.

When the piglets come - a dozen or more - they're a welcome respite in the monotony of her existence. But four weeks later they are taken from her, she is re-inseminated and put back in her sow crate to wait out another 16-week pregnancy.

There's slightly more than a 50 per cent chance that the pig that provided your Christmas ham may not have suffered like Phoebe. Two-thirds of farmers raise their pigs by more humane methods but the other third use sow crates in large-scale enterprises involving 46 per cent of all sows in the country - about 20,000 Phoebes.

Britain and Sweden have banned the crates, which are also called dry sow stalls, and the European Union is planning a long-term phasing out of them.

Our Government is reviewing the welfare code for pigs through its National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee and is calling for public submissions.

Under the Animal Welfare Act 1999 animals must be treated in ways that allow them to display normal patterns of behaviour, except in "exceptional circumstances".

Factory farming is exceptional only in the degree of suffering it causes Phoebe and her neighbours.

If 71 per cent of New Zealand farmers raise their pigs without crates, then why don't the rest?

The Pork Industry Board has a draft proposal that would allow the use of the crates until 2012, enabling farmers to phase them out gradually.

But the industry also wants them to be approved for use in the first four weeks of a sow's pregnancy, as this is the time she is most likely to resorb or miscarry.

The SPCA has started its biggest campaign to ban this cruel farming practice. If sows are to be confined for the first four weeks, the society says, it should be in pens of about 6 sq m, with bedding material provided and a separate dunging area.

Sow crates are not the only abomination. Young pigs (remember, they are marginally more intelligent than your puppy) are often confined in crowded fattening pens with concrete floors where their patterns of behaviour are far from "normal" - so far, in fact, that their tails are cut off to prevent "tail biting" and more serious forms of cannibalism.

Normality, for a pig, consists of much more than a simple abundance of food.

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.