Pig sick of welfare washing

Misinformation

While we continue to import such products, highlighting that they fail to meet our existing welfare standards is a vital step towards increasing consumer knowledge.

But these proposed labelling improvements alone simply won’t cut it. The public may know of a few highly publicised examples of abhorrent farming practices that don’t meet our standards, but arguably the more important question is: do people know about the farming practices that do meet our standards?

In the 1960s, the UK public turned on animal farmers for prioritising efficiency over welfare, which sparked efforts to improve standards. However, it also led to efforts to “welfare wash” the industry – to deceive the public into seeing it as a committed and trustworthy protector of animal welfare. 

Welfare washing is a strategic response to the conflicting desires of the public: to consume large quantities of animal products at a price they can afford without endorsing the extreme welfare compromises necessary to produce them at scale.

We are, and have been for a long time, in a misinformation crisis about what the UK does to its farmed animals.

Suckling

The industry obviously isn’t incentivised to tell us all the details of what happens inside farms, but welfare experts and the government are also sleeping on the job of communicating to the public which practices they are in fact paying for. 

This slack is only taken up by animal advocacy organisations, who among other things investigate, film and disseminate footage from the nation’s farms in exposés.

It’s tempting to assume that the exposés from animal groups show violations of stringent welfare laws and codes of practice, and that the horrors on show are the fault of a few bad apples from an otherwise welfare-focused industry. But this is often not the case.

Take the footage recently released by Animal Equality UK from Cross Farm, an intensive pig unit in Devon. The footage showed piglets on dirty floors suckling from sows confined in farrowing crates only slightly larger than their bodies. 

The piglets had their teeth and tails cut off without pain relief. Weak piglets were killed by being swung by their legs onto a concrete floor, a method called ‘thumping’. 

Pain

The reaction from the public indicated that they felt that their trust had been violated – “I’m not a vegetarian but I expect the animal to have been cared for and euthanised properly and kindly”, and that the footage constituted something illegal – “There needs to be a way to prosecute the supermarket, they are complicit in this”.

But these practices are legal and commonplace. Tail ‘docking’ is a legal method of preventing tail-biting, a behaviour borne out of the indoor farm environment in which 60 per cent of our pigs live. 

You have to do it before the piglet is seven days old, during which time it’s legal to not give them any pain relief. Breeding mothers are legally kept in cages for birthing through to weaning. Piglet thumping is not just legal but recommended – if done hard and quick enough it is considered better than the alternative, dying by starvation or crushing.

Think back to “prime cut”, “finest” foods, “butcher’s choice”. Adding “100 per cent British grown” and “Animal Welfare Certified” onto the packet will only help to convince the consumer that the product is from an ethically reputable source that does well enough by its animals that there needn’t be any qualms about buying from them.

So if the government is serious about tackling consumer ignorance about animal products, then perhaps politicians and ministers should think of a way to properly inform the public about that packet of British ham. 

Imagine a world where labels show whether pigmeat has come from a piglet who had their tail cut without pain relief, who suckled their mother while she was in a cage barely larger than her body, and whose weaker siblings were at best killed by being whacked head-first against the wall of the pig shed. Food for thought, that’s for sure.

This Author

Eva Read is a PhD student at the London School of Economics.