Gestation Crates: A Life of Misery and Torment for Pregnant Pigs

by Jennie Richards · Published September 20, 2018 · Updated September 28, 2018

Since the 1970s, gestation crates have been standard housing in most hog-breeding facilities nationwide. For the nearly 4-month duration of a female pig’s pregnancy, each sow lives, eats, and sleeps in a roughly 2′ by 7′ foot stall that does not allow her to walk, move, turn around, stretch or socialize. After she gives birth, she is moved to a slightly larger farrowing crate for a month to six weeks, when her babies are removed and taken away from her to endure the same torture she does. She is then immediately impregnated again and returned back to the confinement and prison of the gestation crate. The cycle is repeated for 3-4 years until she can no longer get or stay pregnant, then she is slaughtered. Sows are treated like “mechanical breeding machines” for people who buy and consume pork – and propagate this system of horrific abuse to animals.

Sows are basically kept pregnant their entire lives, forcibly raped again and again. They are raised like parked cars, machines positioned side by side, cage by cage, in a giant warehouse that is prison for them. She is completely immobilized, her head rocks incessantly back and forth, she bites the bars in front of her to get out, as she goes out of her mind in psychological torment and desperation. Sows are prevented from expressing any and all natural behaviors and desires — all that is inherent to them as a species. They are treated with the deepest disrespect as sentient beings who are considered smarter than dogs and many apes, by a system that subjugates, dominates, and enslaves them and all animals for food, for profit and consumer demand. The emotions they feel are no different from our own, they feel pain, misery, frustration, anger, and suffering as we do, and they are tormented every single day of their lives in a cruel, inhumane farming system fueled by people who support and propagate it by buying animal products.

This cruelty should be illegal. It is deeply immoral. These standards in the pork industry are abhorrent to animals that suffer like we do.

Consumers can choose not to support this suffering that these animals are subjected to. Each of us has the power to decide what to buy, what to eat, and what not to. It’s a choice we make each and every day. Decide against animal cruelty, and opt for a healthy, cruelty-free plant-based diet. It is better for the animals, the Earth and better for your health.