NYT Article Highlights Cruel Pig Farm Practices

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof recently brought industrial farming’s unethical practice to light in an article for The New York Times. Kristof, who grew up on a sheep farm in Oregon, mentioned the confining gestation crates that pregnant sows are forced to live in that do not give them enough room to turn around. “They live out their adult lives without exercise or meaningful social interaction,” he writes, “it’s like a life sentence of solitary confinement in a coffin, punctuated by artificial insemination and birth.” The result of factory farms’ close quarters has resulted in a series of widespread illnesses like porcine epidemic diarrhea among the animals, which has spurred farmers to attempt to inoculate mother pigs by feeding them the intestines of dead piglets—a cruel practice that was exposed by an undercover investigation by the Humane Society of the United States on Iron Maiden Farms in Kentucky.