Gestation crates are necessary for only one thing: PROFIT. Gestation Crates make the extremely rich people even richer, one poor pig at a time.
The crates simply aren’t even necessary to raise pigs. For generations, family farms have been raising these intelligent and social animals without crates. It is not just that a sow spends a pregnancy or two in one of these torture devices, but the animal is bred again and again and actually can spend up to 80% of her entire life being pregnant, tortured and becoming actually insane. When she is too old to be bred again she is killed.
The hog producers on these industrial farms say these crates are efficient, effective and productive, and claim they reduce the cost of the meat produced for the public, keeping prices down. This seems to put the blame for gestation crates on us, the public, the consumer. It becomes our fault. Do we really want to feed our children silent screams?
The primatologist Jane Goodall writes that “farm animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear and pain. They are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined ... they are individuals in their own right.”
Are we proclaiming to history that the ONLY thing America values is money? Have we sunk THAT far below the surface of Capitalism? Do we want that to be our enduring record? Will that become our own memorial gestation crate?
