The tight-fitting metal cage suddenly surrounds you. Your heart starts to race as your mind turns fuzzy and blank, realizing there is no escape. This feeling is panicked desperation. And it’s what piggie mamas-to-be experience every day in factory farms as they’re stuffed into gestation crates, where they’re locked for months on end. Gestation crates are extremely small cages used to confine pregnant pigs until they give birth to a new litter of baby piglets. At that point, the babies are torn away — and then the mama is forcibly re-impregnated and thrust back back into her cruel, inescapable coffin of a cage. The average sow is forced to breed offspring for slaughter five to seven different times before the industry is done with her.
While locked in these enclosures, the mamas watch helplessly as their excrement piles up around their legs, unable to move or turn around. They can barely even stand up or sit down. Of all the pigs raised for pork in the U.S., 95 percent come from factory farms, where these types of torturous Medieval enclosures aren’t the exception — they’re the rule. Numerous companies, including Smithfield Foods, have tried to fool consumers by pledging to phase out the use of gestation crates. But now, over five years after their initial promise, nothing has changed. Smithfield Foods, Inc. is the largest producer of pork both in the U.S. and also in the world, murdering nearly 30 million pigs every single year. It’s time for them to realize we’re watching, and that we demand they follow through on their promises. Sign the petition telling giant factory farming corporation Smithfield Foods, Inc. to finally end its use of all gestation crates! Sign the petition.