Video: Countless Dead Piglets and Lame, Dying Pigs Found on Abbotsford Pig ‘Farm’

PETA Releases Footage Surreptitiously Recorded Inside Excelsior Hog Farm, One of the Biggest Pig Farms in British Columbia

For Immediate Release:
April 24, 2019

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

PETA has obtained never-before-released video footage from inside Excelsior Hog Farm—owned in part by Ray Binnendyk, a member of the board of directors of the BC Pork Producers Association—that shows severely injured and lame pigs, including some with bloody lacerations and volleyball-size umbilical hernias, suffering in dungeon-like conditions. Heavily pregnant sows were forced to give birth in farrowing crates hardly bigger than their bodies, where they could nurse but not otherwise tend to their babies for the first weeks of their lives, causing many to die unattended. Survivors were forced to live alongside their dead and rotting littermates.

“Mother pigs at Excelsior Hog Farm spend their wretched lives inside cramped metal crates, unable to turn around or attend to their piglets, many of whom are left to die slowly, just out of their reach,” says PETA Senior Vice President of Cruelty Investigations Daphna Nachminovitch. “No meal can be worth the enormous suffering of these intelligent animals who are capable of feeling pain and fear, just as we all are.”

Excelsior Hog Farm sends pigs to Johnston’s, a Chilliwack-based slaughterhouse that claims to work only with suppliers raising pigs under a “clear standard of care” and according to “best treatment practices” and sells in retailers across British Columbia, including Choices Markets and SuperValu. PETA has asked the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to investigate the farm for suspected violations of the province’s Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and is calling on Johnston’s to reconsider its relationship with the farm.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is the human-supremacist worldview that other animals are nothing more than commodities.

Broadcast-quality video footage is available upon request. For more information, please visit PETA.org.