We're a little hypocritical about animal cruelty in this country. We can get very wound up when we read about someone abusing their pet dog or cat, right up to threatening that person with death.
But most of us don't summon the same level of outrage when appalling examples of livestock being mistreated on factory farms comes to light.
The cattle, the pigs, the chickens, they're not our home companions. They're meat on our table, and the cheaper the better. We don't much concern ourselves about their lives before they get there. That's the government's job, right?
© CBC News
This latest story, revealed by CTV's investigative public affairs program
W5, shows a Manitoba pig-breeding operation where sows spend their lives in tiny crates, are repeatedly impregnated to produce litters until they can't anymore, then unceremoniously killed.
Employees cull defective piglets by smashing their heads against something hard.Cruel, yes. But apparently not against the law. Saturday's
W5 segment uses video footage shot secretly by an animal-welfare investigator to expose conditions in the
Puratone facility just north of Winnipeg.
In a
story on W5's web site, reporter Tom Kennedy writes that after viewing the video, Barbara Cartwright, chief executive officer of Canada's Federation of Humane Societies, predicted Canadians were in for a shock.
"They are not used to seeing this," she said. "They still believe animals are being raised in the old farm style."
The reality couldn't be more different, Kennedy writes.
"The video shows what amounts to a living production line with thousands of pregnant sows, each held in a tiny metal stall where they will spend the nearly four months of their gestation," he reports.
"When they are ready, they are transferred to a slightly larger stall called a farrowing crate where they will give birth. After three weeks, the piglets are then sent away for fattening and eventual slaughter while the sows are returned to the gestation crates, re-impregnated to start the cycle again."