French brand Herta, a Nestlé-owned company known for its pork products like frankenfurters, has just been caught massively abusing the animals in its facilities. And this isn't just the "average" animal cruelty we've all sadly come to expect from the heinous industry of factory farming.
Undercover footage by L214, a group of French animal rights activists, shows especially disturbing conditions.
In one video, a hungry pig trapped inside a metal cage with another — dead and laying on its side — leans in and bites off a chunk of the deceased animal's stomach. It proceeds to chew its fellow animal, with no one there to provide it proper nutrients or to remove its dead companion.Sign the petition to demand that the French minister of agriculture, Didier Guillaume, shut down this horrific operation now!Other pigs try to wriggle around in their overstuffed cells, climbing over others, and then slip off the crowd of animal backs, accidentally crushing baby piglets in the process. Staff reveal the use of electrical prods, employing the high-voltage sticks to shock and punish the animals into submission. Meanwhile, the pigs live every day in conditions no one should endure: locked in narrow crates with no straw, bedding, or natural light — just metal bars covering all sides, including the top and bottom of their cages.
Pigs are highly social creatures. They form deep friendships and bonds, and they care for each other immensely. Many experts assert that pigs are equally as smart and social as dogs — and, in fact, perhaps even moreso. For such companionable creatures to live this way, and even worse to
resort to cannibalism, can only be a sign of the most immense suffering imaginable. Undoubtedly, it must have crushing effects on these animals' psyches.
But what Herta is doing is not just inhumane. It's also illegal. The brand has additionally been caught "docking" — meaning, chopping off — their pigs' tails, which is clearly banned in the European Union. It also forces upwards of 20 pharmaceutical prescriptions into its animals, including an antibiotic known as colistin. The World Health Organization has warned farms against the use of colistin, as it is a powerful drug that needs to be reserved as a "last resort" option for humans.
What Herta is subjecting these pigs to is not a life. This is now how any being should spend — or end — their time on this Earth. It's also profoundly illegal, and there must be consequences NOW.
Tell French leaders they MUST intervene and show companies like Herta that if they do not comply with animal welfare laws, they will face serious repercussions. This farm must be shut down, now!