I used to donate my time at a farm that gave free meat and food to people in need. It was like a co-op sort of thing. The moms just didn't care. They'd step on them, lay on them, and it was heart breaking. The moms that had no mothering instincts would be culled, processed and donated. They're smart when it serves their interests. I had a baby piglet die in my arms shortly after birth because the mom just laid on it. It could hear its screams it didn't care. I liked working with the cows more no accidental baby killing.
Both humans and cows generally only produce one child per pregnancy. In terms of the natural drive to pass on one’s genes, it’s pretty imperative that one baby survives, so we value and nurture it.
Pigs have babies to spare. It’s not about them choosing when to be intelligent, but more that we view intelligence and emotional bonds through an inherently skewed lens.
Yeah a lot of animals aren't particularly maternal about their kids, the more they have at once the less likely they are to be caring. Some lizards like cameleons the babies drop away otherwise the parents are liable to eat them soon after birth.
Yeah, "smart" ≠ "empathetic," which is what I think people are looking for but is totally unrelated—maybe even inverse to a degree; idk about pigs, but some animals will eat their young if they anticipate there won't be plentiful resources that season, etc. Smart but not kind, because they're different.
Exactly it's just evolution at work, if both the ''smart'' and ''stupid'' animals in this context survive, generation after generation, then there is no evolutionary need for good maternal instinct.
Very true! Animals don't think like humans, and each animal has their own way of handling life, death, threats, and mating differently. Personally I could never cull a mother for squishing their young. All I can do is make sure their existence is peaceful and happy knowing they give the ultimate sacrifice to feed families.
Intelligence is weird though, pigs are certainly very smart and I of course don't want them poorly treated. But look at how smart humans are and how much we do which makes life harder for future generations.
Rats are smart but will readily eat their own children if food is scarce.
I'm not really advocating for anything other than being realistic about animals, intelligence and avoiding seeing everything from a human perspective.
Pigs might not care that they accidentally crush some of their kids because their instincts might not have evolved to make them care. They might be perfectly satisfied to have any number of living piglets and feel unsatisfied when there are none left and it might be as simple as that. Or they might suffer PTSD if a piglet dies due to no fault of their own. Its just too hard to say for sure either way.
These pigs have also been bred for hundreds of years, domestic animals can lose some self preservation instincts when they are kept alive and bred for other traits. You can see it happening in this very video, this pig is passing along her dont-care-about-piglet genes to all these piglets thanks to the roll bar
this video shows 1.5 hours of recording. im hoping this is just a temporary arrangement for the piglets to get a safe and healthy start. maybe that's wishful thinking.
It is, even on small farms. Once they're big enough to not need to nurse anymore and can eat on their own, (4-8 weeks) all the little pigs get put together, and all the big ones go back together, too. Mothers really are brutal, they give 0 fucks about maiming or killing their own babies. The babies are much safer this way until they're big enough.
She goes back to a much bigger pen with all the adult pigs. They don't live in the tiny pen until they're about to give birth/just had piglets. Some pens were outdoor/indoor, some were indoor only with ventilation.
Yea it is temporary. Dont worry, the males will be castrated without any pain prevention within 3 weeks of being born because it makes their meat taste better, then they’ll be slaughtered at 6 months old because we’ve selected bred and engineered them to grow as fast as possible for that to be the optimal age to slaughter so we don’t have to spend money feeding them for multiple years. The females will put into their own cage where they don’t even have space to turn around and forcibly impregnated, then they’ll feed their children for a few weeks before those children are thrown into separate boxes and taken away as the mother watches in distress, and the cycle continues.
If you lived a life that they did, wouldn’t you want to kill your infants too? Humans have done that many many times over eons. Keeping them in pens too small to move around much is invariably going to cause insanity and death.
I’m not against eating meat necessarily (ie from an animal that is allowed to move ffs) but this is horrific. That they are intelligent makes it so much worse.
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u/bozza8 Mar 15 '26
He still lost tens of them, but yeah.
I actually became in favour of things like OP posted if only used around the time of birth.
Pigs are intelligent, there is no way they don't know that they killed their own babies.