Life Isnt Cheap

Today I would like to talk about pigs. To start with here’s an extract from an essay called Pig Rhythm by Rob Percival:

“Pigs also resemble humans in their mental and emotional lives, in some respects. Pigs are intelligent and sociable. As piglets they are fond of play. As adults they are gregarious. In the wild they like to sleep close to one another, lying nose to nose. They learn to respond to their own names and they wag their tails when they are happy. They dream and have good memories. They experience what can only be described as contentment, happiness, love, fear, grief, anger and sorrow, although these mean something very different to a pig than to a human. As many as 1.4 billion pigs are born to be slaughtered every year and the majority are reared in intensive systems.”

I am not a vegetarian, but the killing and eating of pigs, particularly on an intensive scale makes me deeply uncomfortable. Occasionally I do eat pork, and I try to get it from small/local farms, because what I am most disturbed by is how cheap meat has become, and how easily we cheapen a life until it is only worth paper and coins and a humane death.

A friend at work said to me that we are always amazed when an animal does something reasonable or intelligent (I was surprised to find out that pigs dream and have good memories). But this is because it suits our world-view and our purposes: if animals are unintelligent machines running on instinct we don’t have to feel bad about how we treat them.

But if we accept that these animals can solve problems, that they possess emotions, perhaps as acute as our own, and that they have their own wisdom (even if it is very different from human wisdom), we then have to start valuing their lives. At the very least, we have to treat meat as something costly and sacred, because its value does not just come from the sum of food and water that it consumed while alive. A creatures’ value is derived from the very life that it once possessed.

So, back to the trusty Compassionate Food Guide. Pig welfare varies in how much time the pigs spend outdoors, the amount of space they have and how long piglets stay with their mothers. It ranges from intensive systems to organic and free-range:

• A lot of pigs are reared intensively indoors. In Britain (and throughout the EU) the standards of welfare are better than elsewhere in the world, so buy British.
• Outdoor bred pigs are born in systems with outdoor space, then brought indoors for fattening after weaning and the mum continues to live outdoors. Waitrose, M&S and Sainsburys are better than other supermarkets for supplying outdoor bred pork.
• Outdoor reared pigs are born into systems with outdoor space and spend around half their lives outside.
• Organic and free-range pigs are born and reared in systems with space where they can roam outside.

And here are the assurance schemes in order of piggy welfare:

• Soil Association (the best)
• RSPCA Freedom Foods
• Red Tractor (easily the lowest)

Meat should certainly be a treat, and not something that we eat every day. So instead of getting squeamish and not thinking about where it comes from, we should honour the animal that has provided the meat.

My final word on the matter is to buy from smaller, local farms if you can. Their produce might not be organic, for various reasons, but it seems to me that smaller groups of farmed animals are more likely to have enough space and be better cared for. Smaller, local farms charge more than supermarkets too, which makes sense because life isn’t cheap. So animals are not cheap. So meat isn’t cheap.


As ever, please share any comments/thoughts/corrections/questions below :)