No more porkies: Calling for a real legal ban on sow stalls

| July 24, 2015

Pigs are social and intelligent animals who naturally live in family groups, yet on factory farms they are treated like machines on a production line. Elise Burgess from the animal protection institute Voiceless challenges Australians to speak up and call for a national legal ban on sow stalls.

In Australia, pregnant pigs are permitted by law to spend a significant portion of their lives confined to sow stalls. Sow stalls, or gestation crates, are small metal and concrete cages that are barely larger than the mother pig’s body, restricting her so she cannot even turn around.

This extreme confinement is commonly used to minimise the costs of pig meat production, yet these devices ignore the fact that pigs are sensitive, social and intelligent animals, who naturally live in family groups.

Confining mother pigs to sow stalls causes serious physical and psychological harm, and yet this is the standard reality for thousands of
mother pigs forced to suffer their pregnancies inside sow stalls.

Thankfully, there is already an Australian precedent in getting rid of these cruel devices.

In 2014, the Australian Capital Territory passed an amendment to their animal welfare legislation banning the use of sow stalls and farrowing
crates.

What’s more, mandatory and legally enforceable bans on sow stalls have already been implemented in the United Kingdom and Sweden, with New Zealand to follow suit from the end of 2015. Partial bans have also been legislated in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland and nine US States.

So this is not new territory for industry or legislators.

Sensitive to the growing national and international demand for higher welfare pork, the peak industry body Australian Pork Limited (APL) have
already committed to a voluntary phase out of sow stalls by 2017.

This was a good step forward.

APL’s commitment to phase out the use of sow stalls, however, does not mean all sows will be free from cages.

A quick look at the fine print reveals that under APL’s phase out, pigs will spend less time rather than no time in confinement. Further, the phase out only applies to producers who are members of APL, is completely voluntary and will be entirely self-regulatory.

Self-regulation is a conflicted way of managing animal welfare because at its heart it relies on a promise by industry to abide by animal welfare
standards rather than meaningful monitoring and enforcement mechanisms.

We know this is a problem because some of the most notorious crimes against Australian animals have occurred under systems of self-regulation. The Indonesian live export scandal in 2011 and this year’s revelations of live baiting in the greyhound racing industry both occurred under the watch of self-regulation schemes.

That is why Australia must introduce a real ban on these cruel devices, one that:

• is mandatory across the whole industry and does not just apply only to APL members;
• is monitored and enforced independent of industry; and
• will see legal penalties imposed on producers who fail to comply.

The good news is that since June, many Australians have contacted their local MPs to demand a permanent end to the use of sow stalls in Australia.

Our campaign has also attracted the support of neurosurgeon and Voiceless Patron Professor Charlie Teo AM who has added his voice to the call for a legalised ban.

“Animals are beautiful creatures and should be valued for more than simply what we can take from them, they should be valued as the sentient creatures they are,” said Professor Teo.

“We have been the cause for their exploitation, but we are also the solution.”

On the basis of good science as well as common sense and compassion, we as a community are in a position to improve the lives of these sentient beings, who are totally at our mercy, and for whom we are the voice.

Learn more about Voiceless’s campaign It’s time to ban sow stalls. Let’s make it law!

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