• Animal rights campaigners have laid dozens of dead piglets at the offices of Victorian Premier, Jacinta Allan, in a protest against the government's refusal to address "urgent" animal welfare issues.
• Advocacy group Farm Transparency Project (FTP) organised the protest after receiving footage showing shocking, filthy and cruel conditions at twenty Victorian piggeries, filmed covertly by dozens of activists over the weekend.
• Further footage and the names of all twenty facilities will be released by FTP in the coming weeks.

Animal rights campaigners have gathered outside the ministerial office of Victorian Premier, Jacinta Allan, in a protest against the government's continued support of the pig slaughter industry. The group of around 50 protestors laid the bodies of dead piglets outside the office, each one symobolising a piggery which had been investigated in a coordinated effort by numerous teams of anonymous activists over the weekend. An initial sample of the footage has been released on FTP's website, showing pigs in narrow cages and other extreme confinement systems living in their own waste; sick, dying and dead pigs; and evidence of scavenging and cannibalisation.

As intensive pig farms are notoriously unsanitary, disease-ridden facilities, investigators are seen in the footage following strict biosecurity protocols to avoid introducing or spreading any disease.

The piglets were laid on a white sheet and surrounded with flowers and photos from the farms where they had been found, having died from malnutrition, illness or scavenging, or killed by workers due to being too small or weak to be worth feeding.

FTP's Executive Director, Chris Delforce, said that the rally was in response to the government's continued inaction on serious, systemic issues in Australian pig farms and slaughterhouses, in spite of countless damning investigations spanning more than a decade.

"Last month, 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."

"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."

He said that the work of investigators, like those who provided Farm Transparency Project with the footage released today, was unfortunately necessary when confronted with government apathy and inaction.

"The reality is, no one wants to have to illegally enter a factory pig farm and document the suffering of thousands of pigs. People do this because time and time again, the worst atrocities of these industries have only been exposed by ordinary people risking their safety and liberty to show the reality of commercial farming to the public."

Footage from piggeries: https://www.farmtransparency.org/videos?id=ntyo5hnp2m 

Photos from piggeries: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_p5GWY1CHrdfyMYFerkHEotjpN3FV5RA?usp=drive_link 

Photos and footage from the rally: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eE3dFl7329UH8TpzolQNVQB31pFU_GY9?usp=drive_link