Mother Pigs Jabbed, Electro-Shocked

Mother Pigs Jabbed, Electro-Shocked
at Sausage Provider to Schools

In 2013, a whistleblower captured video footage of terrified mother pigs' final moments inside Southern Quality Meats, Inc. (SQM), a Pontotoc, Mississippi, slaughterhouse.
The Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) has awarded contracts worth more than $6 million in taxpayer funds to SQM to supply sausage to Mississippi schools, many of which have meal programs that are supplemented with federal funds.

The footage shows one SQM worker jabbing pigs with electric prongs, which are normally used to stun the animals with an electrical current prior to slitting their throats, and even using the prongs on one apparently stunned mother pig's lower abdomen and/or genitals for no apparent reason.

As this worker jabbed pigs, some vocalized in distress before they were rendered insensible and hung upside down by one leg to have their throats slit—while other pigs looked on just a few feet away.

And that was just the suffering that was caught on video. The whistleblower also saw SQM workers beat downed mother pigs on the face and head with chains, drag them to the kill floor—a deafeningly loud area filled with the stench of death—and electro–shock and jab injured sows for up to 30 minutes.

By the time they arrive at slaughterhouses such as SQM, most sows have already endured a lifetime of suffering. These playful, sensitive animals, whom animal behaviorists consider to be smarter than 3-year-old children, typically spend their lives crammed inside filthy sheds, where they are denied all that is natural, meaningful, and important to them.

Mother pigs like those slaughtered at SQM are artificially impregnated again and again and typically spend months in gestation crates too small for them even to turn around in, only to be prodded into another crate after they give birth and have their piglets torn away from them after just a few weeks.

When their bodies are finally worn out, these pigs are typically crammed into a truck and endure a frightening trip for many miles through all weather extremes. According to industry reports, hundreds of thousands of pigs are crippled upon arriving at slaughterhouses each year.

Because the federal Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act requires that pigs be handled with a minimum of excitement and discomfort immediately prior to slaughter and during stunning, as is necessary to ensure rapid and effective insensibility to pain—and given that federal funds subsidize Mississippi schools' meal programs—PETA alerted the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service to the conduct documented at SQM and requested an investigation.

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