What we found were extraordinarily inhumane conditions at Smithfield Foods, the largest
pork producer in the entire world.
I still remember the first time I ever laid eyes on a gestation crate facility and seeing
the helplessness of these animals who have done nothing to deserve the fate that they're
enduring, suffering inside of these crates is just absolutely devastating.
The Humane Society of the United States has investigated one of Smithfield's breeding
operations.
This facility represents what gestation crate confinement is -- open wounds, pressure sores,
infections, bleeding gums from biting the bars so much and these animals aren't even
being cared for with individualized veterinary attention.
Regardless of how the system is managed, these pigs are barely able to move even an inch
their entire lives.
They're unable to walk around, to turn around causes them to quite literally go insane.
This is one of the reasons why so many animal scientists and veterinarians have condemned
this extreme confinement practice.
Smithfield about I would say two weeks ago, two - three weeks ago, made an announcement
that we had made a decision to phase out the use of sow gestations crates in all of our
company owned farms over a 10- year period.
Smithfield committed publicly to phasing out gestation crates within a 10-year period,
receiving a lot of praise for doing so.
Now just a couple years later the company is saying that they no longer can meet its
own very generous, self-imposed deadline.
That's completely unacceptable.
Many other pork companies such as let's say Maxwell Foods, which is one of the biggest
pork producers in the country, is already 100 percent gestation crate free.
Cargill another major pork producer is already 50 percent gestation crate free.
The American Farm Bureau, the primary agri-business lobby in the United States funded a poll in
which they found an overwhelming majority of Americans find gestation crates to be inhumane.
This is one of the reasons why seven states in the country have already banned this practice,
why all 27-member nations of the EU [European Union] have banned the practice.
Gestation crates are a practice of the past, not of the future and Smithfield outta be
speeding up that trend rather than slowing it down.