Let's talk about the pigs
When “Mr Trotter’s Great British Pork Crackling”, a product launched in 2011 with a pledge to use higher-welfare, “happy” pigs, turns out (thanks to an excellent produce transparency scheme called Happerley Provenance) to be largely made of skin from European pigs, the fact is reported (The Times 28/2/2019) as being principally an affront to nationalist feeling.
The product is promoted with a slightly offensive cartoon pig wearing a union flag waistcoat, giving the impression that the only thing that matters to people who eat Mr Trotter’s snacks is that the nibbles come from the UK.
Karyn Walker, a director of the company, seems equally confused. She told the Times that the product is British because British seasoning is used in the cooking process, which takes place in Britain. She added, mysteriously: “It becomes British. I suppose it’s like if you’re born in India because you are on holiday there it doesn’t make you an Indian”.
Does she think intensive pig factories are holiday camps? Ms Walker is selling a product launched by food writer Tom Parker Bowles (who is no longer a director of Mr Trotter’s) with the specific USP of being made from pigs allowed to live outdoors some of their lives. According to The Times, Ms Walker is “trying to find out the welfare standards” of their suppliers…and admitted “it was possible that some were kept indoors throughout their lives, contrary to the principle set by Mr Parker Bowles”.
Possible? Ms Walker, there is no doubt that the pigs whose skins you buy are kept indoors all year round, because this is life for around 97 per cent of pigs in the EU.
Pigs are the fifth most intelligent animals on the planet, according to neuroscientists. They are highly sociable and affectionate – very like dogs, given the chance. They can recognise themselves in a mirror, count and learn tricks. Being natural foragers, they are highly inquisitive, with a strong urge to explore their world, make nests for their young and, as piglets, to chase each other playfully in circles.
Most of the billion-plus pigs on our planet spend their short lives crowded nose to tail in bare concrete and metal pens, with a meagre pile of straw for “enrichment”, never seeing the sun or a blade of grass except through the slats of a transport lorry on the way to the slaughterhouse.
To stop them responding to the intense boredom and frustration of their lives by biting each other, piglets’ tails and teeth are routinely removed (without anaesthetic, of course). If you want to look at this practice from the pig’s point of view, imagine a world where toddlers are kept crowded in pens, and prevented from pulling each other’s’ hair not by giving them more toys, but by cutting off their hands.
Outdoor bred pigs, such as those I see pottering peacefully in fields of “arcs” on my frequent journeys through East Anglia, do not suffer so badly. They even experience some joy and freedom before the journey to the abattoir. It should be a matter of great pride that over 40% of pigs in the UK are able to rootle about in a field for part of their lives, whereas in some EU countries barely one percent do. In the Czech Republic, none do, according to Compassion in World Farming statistics. Even though officially the EU asserts that farm animals are “sentient beings”, in real life it treats them as unfeeling objects.
But the sad story of Mr Trotter’s shows that demand for outdoor bred pork is outstripping supply. If their response to the problem is typical, we might suppose that instead of increasing the supply of outdoor bred pork, the industry is quietly sneaking in lower welfare meat to products which consumers think of as higher-welfare.
How little the meat and dairy industry as a whole understands its customers. I don’t buy, for example, outdoor bred sausages because of their quality or flavour, or because I’m some kind of nationalist wearing a Union Flag waistcoat like the pig on the Mr Trotter’s snacks packet. I buy them because I don’t want my money going to a farm where sows live for months in narrow coffin-like sow stalls, unable to turn around and only able to feed their young through bars. I care about the animals. Is that so difficult to understand?
Decent people, not just vegans, are concerned about the welfare of the animals they eat. Vegans might say that is hypocrisy – but it is genuine concern, nonetheless. In one survey, 94% of people from all over Europe agreed that the welfare of animals should be important and 82% thought more should be done to protect them. An award-winning short film, M6NTHS, gently and heart-breakingly shows the world of the factory pig from the animal’s eyes without using PETA-style shock images – I recommend it.
About half a million people in the UK are vegans now; many more avoid meat. It is time the animal farming industry got the message. It’s not just about health. It’s not just because factory farmed meat is stuffed with antibiotics, or just because it tastes of nothing. It’s not even just about the environment.
It’s about the animals.
