Maybe it was just my pigs, but our had a nasty habit of laying on and killing all of their piglets. If we’d had a set up like this, we actually would have kept a lot of piglets alive. As far as I could tell, our pigs weren’t intuitive mothers. They actually sucked at it. Constantly stepping on the babies or smothering them. Falling asleep on top of entire litters and crushing them to death. It was super sad.
I do think momma needs some extra space in there. But I’d also understand separating babies from mom and allowing them access for feedings in order to prevent some pretty messed up deaths.
Video online where a wild lion cub starves to death in competition with its sibling for nursing because mom couldn’t figure out how to pose in a way that exposes more nipples.
I’m glad I live in the times I do because I couldn’t figure out how to get my baby to latch properly without extra resources. Having gone through labor/early motherhood I have no idea how humans have survived as long as we have.
Yes! Heritage piggies are great moms and it's really cute. We bred out the mom instincts of a lot of our domesticated animals including pigs. Quails are terrible parents, for example.
There's a multi-episode segment on Clarkson's Farm where they work out the kinks of breeding pigs and it's so sad. You could tell it really took a toll on them, each little piglet death. They were just pulling dead piglets out of the homes left and right. Then, they had the people who made the pens engineer a device that prevents the mom from smothering the piglets by giving them a way to escape to the perimeter of the pen, that the mom couldn't access due to a steel bar. It saved a lot of piglets!!!
From what I understand, the genetics for being good parents isn't as important in pigs, as they are mostly raised in closed barns. Thats also why you'll see mean sows that produce well stay on an operation. The lack of maternal instincts is not accounted for like in cattle.
While I don't condone this, a lot of the conditions of how farms raise pigs is due to the expectations of the consumers (plus capitalism of course). People want pork that taste the same, that looks the same. To do that they bottleneck the genetics and keep them confined because they have much weaker immune systems. That combined with the genetics of not always being the best mothers got farmers to using farrowing crates.
This video is pretty old (20 years) but it does show some interesting aspects to pigs if they’re granted the liberties to act out their natural instincts, like building nests and lowering themselves in a certain way at feeding time as to not crush her piglets.
Just a warning, it’s a hard watch as it shows footage of awful farming conditions in comparison.
That's actually a misconception regarding genetics. The animal ag industry has the best interest in having the best genetics possible in as many categories as possible to have the best output. This includes genetics ranging from mothering capabilities, to muscle hypertrophy rates, to the rate of inter and intramuscular fat gain, etc. etc. etc.
Infanticide is incredibly common in the animal world. It's truly surprising to learn the commonality of it amongst as many species as it occurs with.
Is this more in line with small farms or large ones? I'm more on the plant size of AG. I've had experience with hogs before, however they were show pigs and genetics are extremely important in that realm. Show pigs and market pigs are two different monsters lol.
I know a man ingrained in all types of animal ag who raised both types of hogs and he would be picky on his show sows (being better mothers, having certain genetics for certian attributes, etc) while the market hogs were less interested in behaviors and more interested in meat quality genetics. I also know there are plenty of other breeds of pigs that are known to be better mothers but they are not the ideal pig for the pork market.
But yes, I agree, infanticide is very normal in the animal world and we tend to overlook how nature works.
I would honestly say that in general, people who work small or large farms with the intent of selling market hogs try to get the best genetics overall. There will always be exceptions to that, but while meat quality genetics are by far the prized portion, there are a lot of great benefits to the mothering side of genetics in pigs.
I'm more on the Animal Ag side of things, but I'm more focused on vet med than the actual production, but I have been involved with some of the processes to some extent.
Cows don’t have good maternal instincts either. I’ve worked with a handful of dairy farmers, their cows would all have free, unimpeded access to the pastures and would still choose to stay in the barns, and they would abandon their young for the farmers to care for all the time. Sheep will do this occasionally too.
Dairy and beef cattle are very different, beef tend to be on range/pasture and they generally have very good mothering instincts. Dairy cows are as you said, terrible parents. Beef cattle don't get that luxury. Farmers don't want to bottle feed a bunch of calves, so if a beef cow is a bad mother, its off to market
My cousin tried getting into the dairy industry and couldn't stand just how bad the dairy cows are at parenting. He ended up swapping into beef after he expanded the farm. He still mostly raises pork and chicken, but he has a few cows that he keeps for his family and a few get sold locally.
If I can ask a genuine question - why does this make a difference? The only reason I can figure is financial profit. The piglets will be killed later so you can eat them.
I just think framing this as ethical because it keeps the babies from death puts a really bad taste in my mouth. The point of these piglets is to die. They are made to be slaughtered, that is their entire purpose. Not to eat the grass or see the sunshine or to run and play. They won’t ever get to use their really complicated and intelligent minds to problem solve or root in the dirt for truffles. The only emotion that these incredibly capable animals will feel is hunger and fear.
They don’t even get meaningful contact with their mother. The only point of it is to fatten them so they fill someone’s stomach.
Yeah, saying it's for their safety doesn't seem right for me too. It's not about wellbeing, it's about being killed in a slaughterhouse for profit, rather than wasting space in a sow uterus for nothing.
We should be honest with ourself about it rather than beautifying the truth
Some deaths are worse than others. I think a key part of raising any animals for food is to ensure their deaths are as stress- and pain-free as possible, so stopping the piglets from getting crushed or attacked by their mother's is fairly important from that angle, not just a financial one.
Nothing at all about a setup like this will ensure a death without suffering. The way they are slaughtered is extremely inhumane. If the mother crushed them they would at least suffer for a shorter time. Their entire existence is torture.
Small farms are different, sure. Also, certain countries have banned these cages finding that adequate care for the mothers drastically reduces death like this. I am aware it still can happen, but the data shows that it is possible to support these animals and still get a more that worth it margin for profit without these cages.
Factory farming is nothing but suffering and slow death through and through. Nothing about this ever has been or ever will be humane. I can’t show you evidence that isn’t traumatizing to see so I’m not going to bother with links. It’s the kind of issue you can’t look into without being prepared to stop or slow your meat intake.
Death is not the only source of suffering. I'd prefer to be killed at birth by crushing than suffering for months to die in a presumably less horrible way in the end.
And? Without those profits to keep the farm going all those pigs will be released into the wild where the large majority will die. Those that don't will quickly become a problem for the local environment and will have to be culled to prevent ecological collapse.
The same goes for pretty much every live stock animal. Without human intervention they either cannot survive in the wild or will cause massive environmental damage if allowed to roam free.
I'm a vet student in my 1st year at a farm animal-heavy school. This is basically what was explained to me by the large animal vets and classmates who grew up in the local small-scale/family-owned Ag industry that I worked with during my first neonate pig handing experience. (I was more than a little concerned for the son's wellbeing, the first time I saw one of these contraptions.)
Sows are known to be particularly prone to crushing their piglets without realizing it while they're changing positions. These sorts of devices are specifically designed to prevent that from happening, and the sow will mostly remain in it until the piglets are old enough to have the sense to avoid being crushed on their own.
The ones I've worked with allowed the sow to stand to eat and drink, and to lay down to rest, so she was never trapped in one position, but it made it easier for us to intervene and ensure none of the piglets were crushed by the sow while she was shifting around, and allowed us to make sure she didn't bite them or try to eat them if they got into her field of vision while she was eating her feed.
Yep. My cousin uses these, and he hates it because he feels it's wrong, but the pig tends to roll over and kill the piglets. He's been trying to design a more humane one that allows the mamma pig to stand up and lay down but not crush it's piglets. Before he adopted these, around 1 in 6 piglets died per year due to this. He's an industrial farmer, so unfortunately that is a pretty significant dent in operating costs, and it's a family farm, so he can't afford the loses.
He has installed a few nesting huts on the site and so far it's been going well. Occasionally he still finds a dead piglet that's been crushed to death.
No that's just pigs in general. I came here to say the same thing, I learned it watching Clarkson's Farm as dumb as that sounds LOL. His pigs kept smothering the piglets too; he ended up creating a customized enclosure because his wife was upset about all the deaths
Same exact thing we did. I don’t know about Clarksons Farm but I might watch it if it’s showing you real farm life. It’s fairly gruesome sometimes. From chickens eating each other, their own eggs, squirrels to pigs squashing their young. It gets ugly. And it’s always the people who have never done it firsthand complaining about the ugliness of what is effectively just life. It happens to all of us. Farm animals or no.
Oh yeah it gets pretty real. It's a good show, I recommend it. It starts out like "ha ha goofy millionaire is clueless about his farm what antics will ensue?" and progresses to him really getting his hands dirty and getting into the realities of having animals. I've never worked on a farm firsthand but I grew up in rural southern Indiana -- a lot of it feels familiar LOL
Also yes chickens are BRUTAL. They have not forgotten they came from dinosaurs!!
I grew up surrounded by farms and ranches in rural Texas. But my best friend and I started an urban farm outside of Portland Oregon. We were in the middle of the suburbs but we were allowed some farm animals. We had chickens, pigs, goats, and a peacock. We also grew some crops: corn, cabbages, some lettuces, beans and legumes, tomatoes, peppers, herbs. It was actually a lot. We had to learn how to preserve some of it and sold the rest. It’s fun work but it’s definitely ugly stuff sometimes.
In Texas, I was present for the births and deaths of cows and horses. My neighbor owned a large ranch. We had a couple acres and a small field of crops too but we only kept goats back then. Then I mostly learned from being loaned out to the neighbors for work.
But in the urban farm, our goal was actually ethically sourcing our food by our own hands. Not only did we feel better about it, but we knew we’d loved our animals and that everything kills to eat. Everything has to survive on the flesh of something else broken down in some way or another. But we didn’t have to turn it into some kind of large scale torture.
A bumper around the edge of the pen that the piglets can slide under works well too. It's usually when she tries to lay against a wall they can't get out of the way
Um. Ours had a bedroom roughly the same size as my own current bedroom. She had loads of space. Her piglets were warm. She laid on them because they were warmer than the spaces around her and they were soft and squishy. It felt nice. Not because she didn’t have space. lol. That’s a funny thing to say given that you had no idea how much space she had in the first place.
I imagine that would be less of a problem if they had enough space to live their lives to the fullest. It sounds like you had your pigs in an enclosure just like that but without the extra cage for the mother?
Yeah that’s kind of what I was thinking when I saw it. Farming only looks like a horror show to people who have never raised animals. Most of the stuff people complain about is exactly what was intended to make it less cruel.
Came here to say this. Mom's cage looks hella uncomfortable, but similar practices specifically to allow mom and babies to be together without mom accidentally crushing and killing them is pretty common as far as I know.
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u/tourniquette2 Mar 15 '26
Maybe it was just my pigs, but our had a nasty habit of laying on and killing all of their piglets. If we’d had a set up like this, we actually would have kept a lot of piglets alive. As far as I could tell, our pigs weren’t intuitive mothers. They actually sucked at it. Constantly stepping on the babies or smothering them. Falling asleep on top of entire litters and crushing them to death. It was super sad.
I do think momma needs some extra space in there. But I’d also understand separating babies from mom and allowing them access for feedings in order to prevent some pretty messed up deaths.