EcoPiggery, Leitchville VIC 2024

During the public hearings for the Victorian inquiry into pig welfare and in the weeks following, the President of the Victorian Farmers Federation (VFF) Pig Council, David Wright, gave evidence about practices used at his piggery (EcoPiggery in Leitchville, northern Victoria) and by the entire pig meat industry. With statements about the pork industry's adherence to “industry best practices,” and commitment to animal welfare, he painted a picture of idyllic farms, under threat from aggressive activists, determined to destroy his industry. 

In the months following the hearings, investigators collected evidence of how pigs are confined and handled by workers at David's EcoPiggery. Here’s what was found:

• Sows confined in farrowing crates, many surrounded by dead and dying piglets and covered in flies. 
• Sows with painful pressure sores and bruises from lying on hard, slatted floors and from their skin rubbing against metal bars. 
• Floors and food covered in maggots.
• Piglets becoming stuck in the slatted flooring, slowly starving to death.
• Sows confined in small metal cages, strikingly similar to sow stalls, for up to a week at a time, despite David Wright claiming that his farm does not use sow stalls. 
• Piglets eating the bodies of dead kittens, who share the sheds with the pigs, and starting to eat their own mother's infected wounds.
• ‘Weaner’ and ‘grower’ pigs with painful, debilitating wounds, including abscesses and prolapses, left in filthy pens with dozens of other pigs.
• Buckets full of dead and stillborn piglets, many with obvious signs of predation from cats, rats and other animals.