What D圎 alleges occurred in the North Carolina facility would be in clear violation of Smithfield’s promise to eliminate the use of crating for pregnant pigs. The group, a loose, decentralized network of activists founded in the Bay Area in 2013 with a stated goal of using “nonviolent direct action to end the exploitation and killing of all animals,” specializes in undercover investigations exposing poor conditions at farms, particularly farms making claims to humane treatment, and has released a bevy of similar reports on other farms across the country in recent years. “We absolutely did see mother pigs giving birth in gestation facilities.” The cramped conditions of those facilities create a huge risk of crushing death for piglets.ĭ圎 took copious photos and video from the facilities it investigated. “It’s not uncommon to see baby pigs in gestation crates,” Wayne Hsiung, D圎’s chief organizer and one of the investigators who visited the Smithfield facilities, says. So too was its January 2018 announcement that it had, indeed, succeeded in transitioning pregnant pigs from gestation crates to a “group housing” model with a much more limited role for crating.īut in a new report, the animal welfare group Direct Action Everywhere (D圎), which infiltrated several Smithfield facilities in North Carolina between June 2017 and February 2018, alleges that Smithfield still uses gestation crates for pigs that are clearly pregnant, as well as pigs that have already given birth. Unsurprisingly, Smithfield’s announcement was met with near-unanimous praise from animal welfare advocates. Ian Duncan, an eminent scholar of animal welfare at the University of Guelph, has described it as “one of the cruelest forms of confinement devised by humankind.” It’s hard to adequately convey in words the brutality involved in gestation crating. In 2007, Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world, made a startling declaration: It would begin phasing out “gestation crates,” an extremely inhumane practice that involves confining mother pigs to fenced-in areas barely larger than their bodies, where they lack any room to turn around.

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