In December 2024, the Victorian government officially responded to the parliamentary inquiry into pig welfare, which recommended an end to some of the most barbaric practices still used in the majority of Victorian piggeries, including sow stalls, farrowing crates, mating stalls, the mutilation of piglets without pain relief or anaesthetic and the killing of 'runt' piglets by blunt force trauma. These changes would have been the absolute bare-minimum the government could have committed to, in order to at least give an appearance of taking animal welfare seriously and standing up to the pig slaughter industry.
We had known not to expect much. The Minister for Agriculture had refused to meet with animal advocates throughout the process, but had been meeting in secret with industry representatives to make sure they were going to be satisfied.
The Allan government opted to ignore the overwhelming evidence presented to it that this is an industry that is rotten to its core, utterly dependent on abuse and secrecy, and beyond redemption; an industry that must be urgently phased out. It's opted to ignore the vast majority of more than 10,000 public submissions calling for a better world for these sentient, intelligent animals. Instead all it has promised is even further tax-payer funding and self-regulation.
Farm Transparency Project and other animal rights organisations have been exposing sickening cruelty in Australian pig farms for over ten years. If there was ever a time for the kind of minor welfare improvements that the Victorian Premier has now rejected, it was a long, long time ago.
And if a decade of damning evidence wasn’t enough, over one weekend in January 2025, dozens of activists went out and investigated twenty Victorian pig farms, capturing an indisputable snapshot of the true brutal state of this industry as it stands today. Pigs living in their own waste, in narrow cages where they can’t turn around, or packed together in barren concrete pens where aggression is inevitable. Newborn piglets with only stubs of their tails remaining, after they were cut off with scissors. Chunks cut out of their ears for identification. Legs trapped in the metal bars of the floor. Dead piglets lying next to their mothers who couldn’t reach them, some of them half eaten by cats or rats. Other piglets sick or dying. Piles of the dead, dumped outside the door.
If this snapshot tells us anything, it’s that the only appropriate response is to shut this industry down. There is no pig farming without cruelty. There is no pig farming without abuse. There is no pig farming without suffering. There is no pig farming without horrific, brutal slaughter.
