Report on undercover video from the Animal Care Review Panel

On Tuesday, the Humane Society of the United States released an undercover video from a pig farm in Wyoming. On Wednesday, I gave you my thoughts on some of the terrible things I saw in that video. The Animal Care Review Panel, facilitated by the Center for Food Integrity, released their report about the video on Wednesday.

Here’s some of the highlights of their report.

Dr. Temple Grandin (animal scientist):  “There’s definitely abusive animal handling shown in that video… A well run operation would not be doing these kinds of things.”

Dr. Candace Croney (animal behaviorist):  “This video was an incredibly disturbing, saddening and horrific example of the worst kind of animal handling. What I saw is the antithesis of every professional standard for animal care and handling published in any industry guideline or any certification program.”

Dr. John Deen (veterinarian):  “The actions seen in this video are abusive to the pigs and unacceptable to society as a whole.”

“The experts noted the video was comprised of brief excerpts and that being allowed to view unedited footage might possibly have allowed them to place the case in better context.”

“But there is no context I can think of that would make the egregious handling seen in this video acceptable,” said Dr. Croney.

Hopefully this will serve as a wake-up call for the owners of that farm. It’s hard to tell what will happen from here… sometimes these types of things lead to prosecution for animal abuse, but not always. Sometimes the farms are completely shut down, and sometimes they can fire the current group of workers and hire new people, with appropriate training, and start over.

I was going to say that this should be a wake-up call for farmers everywhere… But, frankly, farmers everywhere don’t act like this. And employees of every pig farm don’t act like this. It’s time for this farm, and any others who mis-treat their animals, to clean up their act.