Written by Michelle Kretzer
For the first few years of her life, Pippy the Vietnamese potbellied pig was as happy as … well, a pig in mud. She had a home with an older couple and the run of a large yard and was well cared for.
But as her guardians' health began to decline, so did their care for Pippy, and soon she was spending her days confined to a screened porch with no access to the grass that she loved to roll and play in. Her hooves and teeth were overgrown, making it hard for her to walk and eat, and she wasn't getting the companionship that she craved.
A friend of a PETA employee who lived in the area noticed that Pippy never left the porch and seemed despondent. She let PETA know, and when one of our Community Animal Project staffers visited Pippy's guardians, the couple said that they had been looking for a better home for the pig and were happy to have our help.
A wonderful member with a farm in nearby Suffolk, Virginia, gladly took in sweet Pippy, who fit right in with the farm's other rescued pigs, Sherlock and Barb. Pippy loves her new companions and her new home, where she has room to explore, plenty of mud puddles, and all the delicious oranges that she can eat.
Perhaps Pippy and Sherlock's daily adventures will inspire a great novel … or at least inspire some folks to stop eating pigs.
When a surprised Suffolk, Virginia, resident spotted a piglet trotting down a rural road alone, he caught the tiny pig and took him to an animal shelter. The piglet, later named Sherlock, had been castrated, and his tail had been docked, which indicated that he most likely fell off a truck bound for a farm where he would have been fattened for slaughter. Like his crime-solving British namesake, Sherlock's adventure made headlines.
(c) Kencredible
A PETA employee who read about Sherlock set out to find him a home, and faster than you can say, "221B Baker St.," Sherlock was placed at a small farm sanctuary with other rescued pigs, chickens, and turkeys.
This precocious pig, once destined to wind up as a centerpiece, now spends his days cracking such cases as "Who is available to pet me right now?" and "Where is the sunniest spot to stretch out?"
And as for deducing that pigs are meant to be friends, not food? Elementary, my dear Watson.
Last year, PETA and other animal advocates successfully defeated "ag gag" bills in Florida, New York, Minnesota, and Iowa. Now, another "ag gag" bill that would make it illegal to shoot video on a factory farm has just passed in the House of Representatives in Utah. And once again, we're fighting back against this unconstitutional measure.
Flush from her success in her home state of Iowa, Raising Hope star and longtime animal advocate Cloris Leachman penned a letter to Utah lawmakers on PETA's behalf urging them not to block people from gathering the evidence needed to prosecute animal abusers
I hope that Utah legislators recognize that with consumer demand for better treatment of animals, they must work to enforce and strengthen laws, not penalize those trying to expose cruel and illegal practices. Citizens' right to document cruelty to animals—wherever it occurs—is crucial in helping local, state, and federal officials enforce anti-cruelty laws.
Every PETA undercover investigation of factory farms has yielded evidence that workers were abusing animals. We recorded workers who sexually assaulted a pig with a cane, stomped on a turkey's head until her skull exploded, and spit tobacco into chickens' eyes and mouth. This indisputable proof of abuse is key to securing historic charges against and convictions of such abusers on cruelty-to-animals charges.
Utah residents, please ask your senators to vote against this bill and to continue to allow people to expose blatant cruelty to animals.
Fresh off a stint asking politicians to "cut the pork" out of the federal budget, PETA's plucky "pig" asked attendees of Iowa's Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival not to cut the pork off pigs' bodies.
When the "pig" implored, "I am not bacon," the fans of fried fat stopped to listen and take our leaflets. I guess all that bacon grease hasn't ruined their hearts yet.
Written by PETA
When PETA went public with the findings of an undercover investigation at a pig-breeding farm that supplies Hormel in Iowa, we called on the company to ban gestation crates—pens so small that the pregnant sows who are confined to them can't turn around or even lie down comfortably—and then introduced a shareholder resolution to that effect. Less than two years later, the meat giant has announced that it will phase out gestation crates, which cause so much suffering, by 2017.
Among other atrocities at the Hormel supplier, PETA's investigators saw a supervisor shove a cane into a pig's vagina and a worker slam newborn piglets' heads against a concrete floor, leaving them squirming in agony. Referring to a sow, one supervisor remarked to an investigator, "You gotta beat on the bitch. Make her cry." As a direct result of PETA's investigation, six former employees of the Hormel supplier admitted guilt to charges of livestock neglect and abuse.
How You Can Help Pigs
Anyone who brings home the bacon—or the sausage, pork chops, or ham—is unwittingly supporting this atrocious abuse. So when PETA suggests that the best way to help stop the suffering of pigs and other animals raised and killed for food is to go vegan, it's no bull. Order your free vegetarian/vegan starter kit today!
Written by Joe Taskel
A disturbing new undercover investigation inside two pig farms in Goodwell, Oklahoma, one owned by Seaboard Foods, shows injured piglets with their legs duct-taped to their bodies as well as pigs suffering from abscesses, torn body parts, and bacterial infections without being given veterinary care.
Workers are seen chopping off pigs' tails and testicles with no painkillers and hitting pigs in the genitals in order to force them to move from one gestation crate to another. Many of the gestation crates—small metal enclosures in which sows spend most of their lives while they are impregnated again and again—were full of feces and urine. The video shows sows desperately chewing the metal bars of their cages and struggling to stand up. Some are bleeding, and some lie dead.
Seaboard is the country's third-largest pork producer and a supplier to Wal-Mart. Prestage is the fifth-largest producer. Both were investigated.
Did Seaboard know that there was abuse on its farms? Well, 10 years ago, in 2001, a PETA investigation at a Seaboard facility outside Guymon, Oklahoma, led one of its managers to plead guilty to three counts of felony cruelty to animals. Video footage taken by our undercover investigator showed that employees beat pigs with metal gate rods and slammed pigs head-first into the floor in a crude attempt to kill them. Sick and injured pigs were left to die without access to food, water, or veterinary care. Different time, different people, same company, same sort of abuse.
Not an Isolated Incident
Abuse of animals is par for the course on pig farms and all other factory farms. Pigs have the same capacity for suffering as dogs and cats do yet are abused in ways that would be illegal if these animals were the victims.
How You Can Help
The only way to protect animals from this abuse is to stop eating them.
Written by Jeff Mackey
Less than two weeks after receiving appeals from PETA and PETA Germany, RWTH Aachen University, a top German college, has announced that it will no longer perform invasive and deadly training exercises on live pigs in its advanced surgical course, effective immediately!
Earlier this month, PETA and PETA Germany sent university officials and the German state veterinary authority a detailed dossier outlining humane and superior surgical training methods that—unlike the cruel procedures then used by RWTH Aachen—wouldn't risk violating German laws requiring the use of non-animal teaching methods when available.
The outreach to RWTH Aachen followed PETA Germany's discovery that as part of the "Advanced Skill Course" at the school's surgical clinic, students were cutting open pigs' chests, inserting tubes, and surgically removing their organs before finally killing the animals.
While RWTH Aachen and the University of Ulm in Germany have both recently scrapped the crude and archaic use of pigs in labs in favor of training surgeons on modern and sophisticated 21st century technology, some U.S. facilities—including the University of Michigan—continue to cut holes into pigs' limbs, throats, and chests and stab needles into their bones and hearts for trauma training exercises even though superior simulation methods exist.
Please tell officials at the University of Michigan to cut out cruel trauma training on pigs and start using humane, contemporary methods of instruction instead.
It's a brave pig who can crash a barbecue hosted by a group of hunters. But that's exactly what two PETA "pigs" did at a campaign stop for Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. The "pigs" were protesting taxpayer subsidies of cruel factory farms.
Although they were quickly shown the door, the precocious "pigs" made the most of it, with a grand exit atop a convertible with flags waving and country music blasting while photographers snapped away.
You've played Words With Friends, but what about lights with pigs? A new app called "Pig Chase" puts players finger-to-snout with real pigs on farms.
A player moves a ball of light on the screen, and the light is displayed on a large touch-sensitive panel in the pig's pen. The human player can see the pig's snout as it touches the screen. The human player must use his or her fingers to keep the ball of light near the pig's snout in order to help the pig move the ball of light into a goal triangle with his or her snout. When successful, the pig is treated to a bright, colorful light display.
Pig Chase was designed to help satisfy a European Union directive requiring farmers to provide pigs with entertainment to lessen the stress that causes pigs to attack each other in cramped factory-farm conditions.
While a game can't change the intensive confinement, multiple mutilations, and filthy conditions to which pigs are subjected on factory farms, perhaps it will help people start to see pigs for the bright, inquisitive animals they are and help pigs pass the time. People may start to realize that if we wouldn't eat the dog we play fetch with, we shouldn't eat the pig we play chase with. And that will make a big difference for pigs on farms.
Written by Paula Moore
Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ruled to uphold a Texas law that requires doctors to describe ultrasounds and play audio of the fetal heartbeat to women seeking abortions.
No matter where you stand on abortion, we hope you'll appreciate the billboard that we'll be erecting in Austin, Texas.
Pig: © iStockphoto.com/Chris Pethick
After all, the meat industry is responsible for immense suffering—from castration without painkillers to animals who are shackled and have their throat slit, sometimes while fully conscious—and billions of deaths, which is about as anti-life as it gets. In contrast, a vegan saves 100 lives a year in addition to reducing his or her risk of dying prematurely from many of our nation's top killers, including heart disease and cancer. Now that's pro-life by any definition!
If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
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