Editoral: Plight of pigs is nothing new but it is time we confronted it

Opinion

It is hard not to feel sorry for Colin Kay, whose piggery near Levin was the subject of last weekend's Sunday programme. Cameras accompanied animal welfare activists as they took comedian Mike King to Kay's pig farm to highlight the conditions in which the animals live.

The problem is that Kay has been singled out and implicitly vilified for practices that are very probably widespread.

Not incidentally, he has also been the victim of trespass, or perhaps even breaking and entering, with the connivance, if not the active encouragement, of a state-owned broadcaster.

The morning after the programme aired, MAF inspectors swooped and the unabashed farmer said they had found nothing wrong with the farm. His statement is at best premature - at week's end MAF was saying that the inspectors' report had not been completed and indeed were giving no timetable as to when their findings would be announced publicly.

But it seems likely that the inspectors did not find Kay's husbandry exceptionally cruel or hideous. If they had, they would presumably not have returned to their offices to push paper around for a week; they would have acted summarily, if only provisionally, to mitigate the animals' suffering while their full report was compiled.

If it transpires that the management of the Kay piggery complies with the existing welfare code, it will plainly be the code that is the problem. Agriculture Minister David Carter has asked the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee to review the 2005 code for pigs as a matter of "highest priority". But for all its dramatic presentation, Sunday revealed nothing new. The New Zealand Herald archive bulges with stories about calls to outlaw sow crating and other cruel practices of intensive pig farming. A 75,000-signature petition was presented to Parliament in April 2000 (the animal welfare lobbyist Hans Kriek, who featured prominently in the Sunday report, was a prime mover). Green MPs, notably Sue Kedgley, and Jim Sutton, the Clark Government's straight-talking Agriculture Minister, were among many who have been frequently outspoken on the issue in the years following.

It would, in short, have been very difficult to remain unaware of the controversy surrounding pig farming. But King seems to have managed such ignorance with ease. The comedian was the promotional face of the pork industry for several years, describing himself in one ad as "a bloke who likes to know where his next meal's coming from". That script was about buying pork "from Godzone, not God knows where", but now he says he knew nothing about the meat's hellish provenance.

He professed shock and horror at what he saw on Kay's farm, but he is scarcely entitled to amazement. Celebrities who do commercial endorsements owe their public at least the semblance of due diligence: if they are simply going to read the autocue and pocket the cash, they might have the decency to blush - and make a donation to animal welfare - when their lazy credulity is exposed.

As to the fate of the pigs, much remains to be done. An industry spokesman says locally produced free-range pork constitutes "about 45 per cent" of the market, but shoppers know that pork labelled as such makes up only a tiny fraction of what is on sale. Perhaps he expects us to believe that some free-range pork is not so labelled.

A review of the welfare code - indeed, of the industry - is urgently needed and it must be open and transparent. But consumers can exercise power too. The move to free-range eggs was influenced by shopper pressure. If meat-eaters want to put an end to cruelty in pig-farming they need only leave the pork in the supermarket chiller. Local beef and lamb, after all, is all free-range.