The Koch fertilizer plant in Brandon, Manitoba, CA has, since at least 2004, been listed by "Climate Change Connection" as the worst "large final emitter" in this province. “LFEs” are industries or landfills which spew at least 50 thousand tonnes of C02 equivalent into the air annually. Latest figs. show the Koch plant released almost 800 thousand tonnes in 2018. (A PinP photo.)
More people die every year from fossil fuel pollution than have died from COVID-19 since the outbreak in early 2020. According to new research, 8.7 million died prematurely in 2018—more than 18% of the entire global death toll for the year. And while the daily media coverage of the pandemic is on every news feed 24/7, pollution-caused deaths remain largely unnoticed. Details here.
I feel I must respond to a column now appearing in some weeklies in Manitoba, (See bottom) “Agriculture, environment and animal care.”
Cam Dahl, Apologist-in-Chief for Manitoba Pork.
What a masterful piece of propaganda from Cam Dahl, GM of Manitoba Pork, the official mouthpiece of an industry that’s become a runaway train in this province!
He commits so many sins of omission, trying to convince us of the industry's environmental virtues, Lucifer himself must be blushing!
For example;
Recent tests done for the global charity, World Animal Protection, have found “superbug” genes developing in waterways around large pig barns in this province.
This is huge. Why?
Because, while we already know people can ingest superbugs either by coming in close contact with infected animals or eating the meat, this surely reveals a previously unknown pathway these harmful organisms can follow to invade our lives.
It surely makes those who eat fish from the contaminated water, even the crops fertilized with hog slurry, vulnerable.
Meanwhile, I guess the comprehensive water-monitoring the industry brags about doing, missed this "minor detail!"
Yet, for years, Manitoba Pork has ignored formal requests from Hog Watch Manitoba to initiate a comprehensive water monitoring program. This could settle, once and for all, the age-old debate over how much nutrient is running off fields spread with liquid manure, into surrounding lakes and rivers. It's non-response has been deafening.
So where's your reference to these things, Cam? Did you forget? Did you not know?
A growing threat
And, if nothing’s done (and little is) about “AMR” , it's on track to claim almost 400 thousand Canadian lives by 2050. It occurs when “superbugs” develop in animals and humans which are either resistant or downright immune to treatment. It’s largely because of the immense amounts of antibiotics being used on both humans and animals. (The industrial livestock sector, however, accounts for the lion's share - almost 80%.)
And, if you don’t believe this is happening right here within the murky confines of our own factory “farms,” think again.
Latest Government of Canada figures show, infection rates everywhere are getting worse. And the amount of drugs Manitoba’s producers are feeding their herds, is apparently trending upward. (These were being given, not just to treat disease, but to prevent it and to make animals grow faster, too. And they include several considered important in human medication.)
Almost all of these practices spit in the face of experts everywhere who flatly warn, “Stop giving medications of critical importance in treating deadly human infections, to your animals!”
Propaganda rules!
This industry believes it can mask science with propaganda. Just watch this corporate video (in which I contrast the "company line" with a dose of reality) to find out what I mean.
Humane treatment of animals.
Dahl would have us believe that his industry nobly protects its animals from undue hardship or cruelty.
This is a lie.
Since the dawn of the factory “farm,” operators from Manitoba to Malaysia, have confined millions of pregnant sows to tiny steel cages for much of their lives. It’s a terrible fate these defenceless animals have had to endure for too long.
Now, it’s one they’ll have to suffer for a lot longer. Why? Because the industry is breaking its promise to do away with these “torture chambers” by 2024, three more years from now. Now, it’ll be at least 2029, another eight!
So, when is a promise not a promise? When the hog industy makes it!
Government complicity
Dahl must know that he can spout his falsehoods with impunity. That’s because he has enablers in high places. The Government of Manitoba has long-since abandoned it’s sacred duty as a regulator, holding this bloated industry to enlightened standards which once helped protect us and our environment from its excesses.
In 2017, under the guise of “cutting red tape,” Premier Brian Pallister and his government:
1.scrapped a requirement that new barns be built with state-of-the-art pollution control equipment;
2.slashed fire safety standards, making new barns cheaper but probably even more dangerous for thousands of hapless animals who. because there are no exits, get trapped and perish in horrible infernos when they burn down;
3.and now, a government-appointed board is over-riding local councils who have the audacity to reject new barn proposals.
And, as if fertilized by their own by-product, pig factories are now popping up like bad weeds, everywhere. Not surprisingly, this is sewing seeds of discontent and division in once-harmonious communities.
Ag Gag laws
Under the guise of protecting farm animals from injury and disease, the Pallister government has introduced new laws. These make provisions that punish activists who may want to demonstrate on "farm" property. Even though there are already laws to protect against trespassing (one MB producer told me himself, an intruder got six months for coming onto his property some years ago), and even though I was unable to pry from this government any actual examples of such harm, they're pressing ahead, anyway.
These Ag Gag laws are nothing more than an affront to freedom of the press, freedom to protest and democracy itself! Apparently taking his cue from several knuckle-dragging US States, then some copy-cat provinces, these Draconian measures turn common justice upside down. They do nothing to stop industry transgressions which are now “baked in" to its very DNA. Quite the opposite. They penalize those of us with a conscience, who want to expose them!
My favourite TV comic, Bill Mahr, puts an interesting perspective on Ag Gag laws, from the US side, where they all began.
This government has morphed into nothing more than a tawdry puppet for a high-maintenance, assembly-line pork machine which couldn’t exist if it had to operate in ways that are clean, sustainable or decent.
A few years ago (to give but one example), this government shelled out more than 800 thousand of our tax dollars (a figure I had to drag from the Government though Access to Information) to help the industry deal with largely self-inflicted losses it suffered, battling “Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.”
PED is as horrible as it sounds. Many piglets, just days old, rapidly dehydrate, then die, vomiting and spewing diarrhea. One producer confided to me, “When PED breaks in a barn, there’s a complete loss of all pigs under 14 days old.”
So how many died, overall? Well, the government claims it doesn’t know and the industry (surprise, surprise), won’t say. It was an ugly chapter in the history of veterinary medicine. Nor will it be the last. African Swine Fever, possibly the worst disease of hogs known, is knocking on North America’s doorstep as we speak. Once it arrives, even industry sources agree, it’ll be a disaster. Even more troubling is the potential that a disease like NIPAH, harmful to both pigs and humans, might take roots here, too.
Experts say, the crowded, remorseless conditions which have been the trademark on these “farms” for many years, make it easier for these diseases to run rampant.
A legacy of waste
As all this happens, the Manitoba industry ships well over 90 percent of its product to faraway places, while leaving behind one hundred percent of the shit and offal from eight million animals. That’s now what we citizens here at home are left to cope with, not to mention our waterways, long struggling under the burden of poisonous pollution, and wide-spread eutrophication.
Carcasses ready to be hauled away from a Hutterite Colony in SW Manitoba to a rendering plant in Winnipeg. Scenes like this are not uncommon near the provinces hog factories. A PinP photo.
One informed industry source estimates some three thousand hogs per week die on the province's hog "farms" before reaching market.
Imported corruption.
Dahl must also know by now that the biggest company MB Pork represents, HyLife Foods, is now controlled by a huge and shady, Thai-based conglomerate, “CP Foods.” Six years ago, the Guardian Newspaper exposed CPF as having links, through its seafood division, to slavery and murder on the high seas.
Premier Pallister, this has happened on your watch! You are responsible for letting corporate sleaze like this in to my province, a sovereign space which ought to be safe for its citizens. You are now apparently beholden to any entity that shows up, bearing money. Are these new corporate arrivals greasing the war-chest of the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba, just like three of HyLife’s founders were doing for at least a decade before the takeover? I have no idea. But it’s surely a question you, Premier, must answer.
Secret and unaccountable.
My repeated attempts to get comments from Manitoba Pork on stories like this, are met with a stony silence. This opaque agency comes out from under its rock only at the time of its own choosing. It is unaccountable, irresponsible and dangerous. And it seems to have little to fear from a compliant and disinterested media.
Apparently, in Dahl's mind, sweeping aside the veils of secrecy and exposing these realities, make people like me, “Old MacDonalds,” basking in nostalgia for "the old days."
If there are no alternatives to Cam Dahl's version of "modern agriculture" (which, of course, there are), God help us all!
Aggressive efforts to limit global warming will sharply reduce future sea-level rise, suggests a paper published in Nature.
Icebergs in Sermilik Fjord, SE Greenland Credit: Donald Slater
A second paper, also published in Nature, indicates that warming of 3 °C could cause sea level to increase by 0.5 cm every year by 2100 as a result of melting Antarctic land ice. The findings provide further insight into the impact of melting land ice on global sea-level rises.
This animation shows the rate at which the ice thickness is changing in meters per year (more red/yellow means faster thinning and thus faster ice loss) as the Antarctic Ice Sheet responds to changes in the atmosphere and ocean due to one potential climate scenario. This simulation, using the BISICLES ice sheet model, represents one of hundreds of such simulations used for this work to characterize ice sheet response to changes in the climate. Credit: Daniel Martin and Courtney Shafer.
Since 1993, land ice has contributed to around half of all global sea-level rise and this contribution is expected to increase as the world warms. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is the largest land ice reservoir and its ice loss is accelerating. Complex ice sheet models can be used to project the contribution of land ice to sea-level rise, but they require massive computational power and cannot explore all possible outcomes, owing to uncertainties in the projections.
Tamsin Edwards and colleagues use a statistical and computationally efficient approach to emulate the behaviour of more-complex models to project glacier and ice sheet contributions to sea-level rise under a range of scenarios. They find that if the ambitious Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5 °C was met, the contribution of land ice to sea-level rise could be halved by 2100—from the median projected sea-level rise of 25 cm under current climate projections, to 13 cm. The authors also suggest that melting from the Greenland Ice Sheet would fall by around 70% and that the contribution of melting glaciers to sea-level rise would also halve. The authors indicate that there is no clear difference for Antarctica under different emissions scenarios, owing to uncertainties in the competing processes of snowfall accumulation and ice loss. However, if the most extreme ice sheet behaviour is assumed, Antarctic ice loss could be five times higher, which would increase median sea-level rise to 42 cm under current pledges.
In a separate modelling study, Robert DeConto and colleagues find that limiting warming to the Paris Agreement’s alternative target of 2 °C maintains roughly constant Antarctic ice loss at current rates. However, in a scenario with warming of 3 °C—the warming trajectory consistent with current fossil fuel emissions—the authors predict that the rate of ice loss will increase substantially from 2060, triggering sea-level increases of 0.5 cm per year by 2100. Once a threshold of rapid sea-level rise is reached, modelling of optimistic, yet theoretical, approaches to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere shows a reduction, but not cessation, of further sea-level rise over the coming centuries.
The two papers highlight that aggressive efforts to limit global warming will sharply reduce future sea-level rise. For Antarctica, Tamsin Edwards and colleagues find that the complexity of competing processes on the ice sheet make it difficult to make concrete predictions about its future, and Robert DeConto and colleagues show that it is keenly sensitive to warming of 3 °C and greater. Thus, for the largest body of ice on the planet, important uncertainties remain.
Almost four years ago I saw a full colour, half page ad placed by the Manitoba Pork Council with the Winnipeg Free Press. It claimed that Big Pig, as I know the MPC, had the strictest environmental protection of any jurisdiction in North America. So I wrote the former CEO to ask who had the second strictest. Obligingly, he wrote back to say that he didn't know. Yes, he didn't know. Meaning that the published claim was specious. (I exposed that lie before a legislative committee with the CEO in the room and the ad never again appeared in the Free Press.)
So, excuse me if David McInnes' gushing about Canada's record in food sustainability appears to be similarly suspect. I duly note that he is under contract to 22 various and sundry special interest groups seeking some sort of Good Agribusiness Seal of Approval for food sustainability.
You report Maple Leaf Foods, of listeriosis infamy, buying indulgences in response to climate change. Paying industrial agribusiness to store carbon is window dressing. It is form over substance. Farmers should be managing the land in the pursuit of regenerative agriculture because that is their calling, not because a billionaire needs them for promotional purposes that will enhance his company's status before a gullible media.
On November 8, 2019 the Free Press published a story entitled "Maple Leaf Foods says it's now carbon neutral". Michael McCain gushed about his company's concern for the environment. This is the company that got a special dispensation from Gary Filmon (former MB Premier) to destroy our locally sustainable hog farming community in favour of the current oligopoly that sees 8 million pigs raised under inhumane conditions with an enormous carbon footprint which in no way can be mitigated by writing a cheque to a foreign corporation.
The Globe and Mail of December 17, 2019 reported that BMO has consumed the Kool-Aid. Maple Leaf now qualifies for BMO's "sustainability-linked" loans because of its ESG (environmental, social, governance) principles. However, to its credit, the Globe also noted that BMO did not audit, nor will it ever audit, Maple Leaf's ESG performance. And if it otherwise observes ESG failure, Maple Leaf will endure no financial penalty on its "sustainability-linked" loans. (BMO did not reply to my letter of complaint.)
Farmers will benefit financially if they embrace regenerative agriculture. That's unavoidable. Humans will secure our future because such agriculture can contribute enormously to the drawdown our annual carbon production. Healing our soils worldwide will help to heal our climate and reverse the insidious desertification about which we were warned in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment over 20 years ago. Michael McCain writing a tax-deductible cheque to Indigo Ag in Boston only guarantees a deposit to Indigo's bank account and favourable media for Maple Leaf. Consultant McInnes speculates that Canada may be "the most sustainable food producer anywhere". In the meantime, Manitoba is overrun with what Big Pig four years ago called, essentially, the most sustainable pig factories in North America...until they weren't.
Restorative agriculture demands commitment. Will Manitoba farmers rise to the challenge? This spring, check out the landscape. You will see fields tilled as black as the Ace of Spades. You will see topsoil blowing into ditches. Shelter belts being removed. Poison being applied. Drainage being accelerated. Wetlands destroyed. Carbon being surrendered to the atmosphere. And Mr. McInnes boasts of our "sustainability credentials"? That Maple Leaf, one of his clients, is part of a proposal to develop a "Canadian Agri-Food Sustainability Index" is terrifying.
Since Covid-19 cases are going in the wrong direction, I decided to repost "My Hero is You." It's a 15 minute video which I narrate. It's designed to help kids navigate through these tough times. It was made available via a United Nations committee about a year ago. It's illustrated with colourful, original images. While it's designed for older kids, you parents can decide if it's right for them. I call it a "Grampa Lar" production. Larry.
I spotted these carcasses while going for a walk along the causeway across the northern section of the lake today. These were north of the causeway. I did not spot any to the south. They also appeared smaller and younger than the victims of the major kill which occurred on the same lake two years ago.
Prairie producers were feeding more antibiotics to their pigs in 2018 than 2017.
Antibiotics have been bestowing a world of good on the human condition ever since - and even before - Alexander Fleming discovered the most famous one - penicillin - almost a century ago. Thanks to their ability to counter deadly infections - life expectancies have increased dramatically - and millions of lives have been saved - truly a turning point in the history of mankind.
But storm clouds have been gathering over this “age of enlightenment” for some time now.
It’s called “Antimicrobial resistance.” AMR happens when antibiotics are used too much, or for the wrong reasons. This does happen when treating people. However, as our own Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) makes clear, the real story lies elsewhere.
“There’s increasing evidence,” PHAC warns on its website, “that the use of antimicrobial agents in veterinary medicine and livestock production is an important contributing factor in the emergence of bacteria in people which have grown resistant to these medications.”
And the World Health Organization leaves little doubt about what should be done. “Simply stop giving animals such medications altogether, whether to promote growth or prevent disease. Healthy animals should only be treated if disease is diagnosed elsewhere in the same herd. And, even while treating animals already sick, only medications not considered critical for the treatment of human infections, should be used.”
If that’s the advice, what’s the reality?
The “Canadian Integrated Program for Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance” is federally-mandated to find out how many of these drugs are used and why. Here’s what the 2018 CIPARS report reveals.
The use of antibiotics by industrial hog producers across the country was still common that year. (No more recent figures are available.)
And, producers were still administering them for all the reasons warned against by the WHO. (See graph.)
They included nineteen different antibiotics considered important in the treatment of human infections.
Producers in Ontario and Quebec actually fed “significantly less” than they had in 2017. But, for their counterparts on the prairies (Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta) it was a different story. In terms of both dosage numbers and quantities, they fed more.
While the Prairie industry actually administered fewer drugs by injection than they had the year before, one of the products injected remains of particular concern. Ceftiofur is considered to be of “very high importance” in human medicine. And that’s because, while it’s not used on people, it’s closely related to another, ceftriaxone which is. And its feared, resistance which may develop to one, could readily transfer to the other.
The role of the livestock industry - and its consequences.
Almost eighty percent of antibiotics sold in this country are used to raise animals for food. And one rough estimate from the Food and Agriculture Organization places yearly usage in the world’s livestock, at a-quarter-million tonnes.
Such volumes provide ideal conditions for harmful microbes to develop resistance and grow into “superbugs.” These can then be transferred to those of us who eat the meat. And when we become sick, fewer and fewer of the best drugs used to treat us, are working.
“If AMR isn’t contained,” cautions the WHO, “medical procedures such as caesarean sections, hip replacements, cancer chemotherapy, organ transplantation, malaria, tuberculosis and even childbirth will become increasingly risky.”
Just over a year ago, the Council of Canadian Academies confirmed that more than five thousand people had died as a direct result of AMR in 2018. And, if resistance continues to rise (which is considered highly likely), almost 400 thousand more of us will probably succumb by 2050.
And the O’ Neill report commissioned by the UK government in 2014 predicted that, by mid-century, AMR will claim ten million lives a year, more than cancer itself. As the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, ominously concluded, “If we fail to act, we are looking at an almost unthinkable scenario where antibiotics no longer work and we are cast back into the dark ages of medicine"
My request for comment from Manitoba Pork, which represents the industry here, went unanswered.
FOOTNOTE:
Given the dominance of the pork industry in Manitoba, where I live, I've been focussing on it in my research. This is why other livestock sectors are not mentioned here. l.p.
Public waterways next to industrial farms in Manitoba contain antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) that are dangerous to public health says a report from the global charity World Animal Protection. The report is the first multi-country investigation of its kind.
Farmer Jeff Linton of Linton Pasture Pork, a high welfare farm in Ontario inspects one of his piglets. He is against all forms of industrial farming practices, including overcrowding animals which can cause stress and sickness leading to routine antibiotic use for disease prevention. World Animal Protection applauds farmers like Jeff who put the welfare of the animals first. Credit: Nina Devries/World Animal Protection Date: August 2019. (CNW Group/World Animal Protection)
ARGs should be of concern because they are the building blocks for "superbugs" (bacteria that have developed resistance to one or more antibiotics). This means those antibiotics will be less or ineffective in treating infections in humans. Some antibiotics are already ineffective in some parts of the world. If action is not taken, in future, routine procedures like caesarean sections or cancer treatments could become dangerous worldwide.
The report found that industrial farms could be discharging superbugs into the wider environment as a result of pig waste being spread on fields and leeching into groundwater and public waterways.
Once in the environment, superbugs can reach humans in multiple ways. This includes through recreation such as water sports, eating fish from contaminated water and eating of crops contaminated with surface water.
In Manitoba, the presence of ARGs was evaluated from samples collected in November 2020 from publicly accessible spaces upstream and downstream of eight industrial pig farms. The investigation found ARGs resistant to antibiotics included cephalosporins and fluoroquinolones, which are of most concern to the World Health Organization (WHO). These antibiotics are the last line of defence for common infections like urinary tract infections or to keep patients alive with life threatening conditions like respiratory infections, when other antibiotics fail.
The routine overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture is recognized by the WHO and the United Nations as a significant contributor to the emergence of superbugs. Up to 10 million people are expected to die from superbugs each year by 2050 if action isn't taken to stop their overuse.
On industrial farms, mother pigs are often stuck in cages their entire lives, their piglets suffer from painful procedures such as tail cutting and the animals are forced to spend their lives in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions on concrete floors, with no enrichment. This can cause stress and sickness, so routine antibiotics are used on the animals for disease prevention.
Lynn Kavanagh, Farming Campaign Manager, at World Animal Protection, says,
"Industrial animal agriculture is taking risks with people's lives by routinely using antibiotics, which is fueling the rise in dangerous superbugs," she says. "Keeping animals in conditions where they're healthier, is the only way to stop the overuse of antibiotics on farms. We need to stop using antibiotics across groups of animals to prevent sickness."
World Animal Protection also interviewed people from communities near the farms where testing was done.
Vicki Burns is with the group Hogwatch Manitoba and says they have been trying for years to get government attention on their concerns about the pig farms. She says there are toxic odours coming from the barn, impacting the communities and that too much manure gets into the local lake.
"It's very challenging", says Burns. "It's hard to get any people in power to pay attention to the problems of industrial agriculture."
Bill Massey is a local small scale pig farmer. He says, "I think in terms of antibiotic use, animal welfare, animal health, and just the ethics of this whole thing, I can hardly believe we can treat animals like this. When you take an intelligent animal like that and you put them in those kinds of conditions, you can imagine the stress animals are enduring."
From January 2022, it will be illegal in the European Union to administer antibiotics across groups of farm animals to prevent disease. Canada should follow suit.
It is important to note that antibiotics are crucial to treat individual animals who become sick; but stopping the prophylactic use of antibiotics will also make them more effective when needed.
World Animal Protection also urges the Canadian government to help farmers transition to more sustainable and humane systems where animals don't suffer and human health isn't at risk.
About World Animal Protection
From our offices around the world, including China, Brazil, Kenya and Canada, we move the world to protect animals. Last year, we gave more than 220 million animals better lives through our campaigns that focus on animals in the wild, animals in disasters, animals in communities and animals in farming. For more information visit www.worldanimalprotection.ca
SOURCE World Animal Protection
For further information: Please contact Nina Devries, ninadevries@worldanimalprotection.ca for interviews with a spokesperson, images and B-roll.
The Pine Island ice shelf - Antarctica. Photo credit - NASA ice.
Researchers have confirmed for the first time that Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica could cross tipping points, leading to a rapid and irreversible retreat which would have significant consequences for global sea level. Story here.
Members of the "neonic" family are known mass-killers, esp. of pollinators such as honeybees. "Karen" holds dead bees at Hayes Valley Farm.
Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency has announced that neonicotinoid insecticides are not a threat to aquatic insects when used as a seed treatment on canola and in many other instances. Details here.
A third of the planet's agricultural land is at "high risk" of pesticide pollution from the lingering residue of chemical ingredients that can leach into water supplies and threaten biodiversity, according to research published Monday. Story here.
Sows confined to steel "gestation crates," a common practise in the industry.
"Ag-gag" legislation is silently sweeping across the nation, and both Hog Watch Manitoba and the Winnipeg Humane Society have serious concerns. The term "ag-gag" refers to any piece of legislation which stifles the ability of concerned civilians to document and report animal cruelty and abuse inflicted upon farm animals.
On March 10, the Manitoba government publicly released Bill 62 and Bill 63, which seek to make it illegal for Manitobans to not only document farm animals during transportation, but to bear witness to all livestock (including horses) in transport trucks, production facilities and slaughterhouses.
Factory-style hog barns that are dominating the hog industry now are a far cry from the family farms that many of the public still envision. The pigs are never outside, but are constantly confined in large facilities with slatted floors, through which their urine and feces fall to pits below. The toxic fumes, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide emanating from the pits will suffocate the animals within a couple of hours if the ventilation systems fail.
The imminent danger of ag-gag legislation being passed in this province means these Manitoban pigs will have no one advocating for their welfare. There will be no way for Canadian consumers to know of the inhumane conditions these pigs endure. Instead, the general public will be at the mercy of the industry’s secretive treatment of farm animals.
In addition to the above legislation, the two groups have learned that Canadian Hog Producers plan to delay the deadline for getting rid of gestation stalls in hog barns. The industry deems gestation stalls as a completely humane and acceptable way to confine sows, even though the animals are so severely restricted that they can take only a step or two forward or backward.
According to the Code of Practice for Pigs, hog producers were previously mandated to replace their intensive confinement systems (gestation stalls) with open housing systems by 2024. This agreement was reached in 2014, which will have given producers 10 years to make this change. However, this deadline is now at risk of being extended to 2029, allowing sows to remain in the cruel, restrictive gestation crates for an additional five years.
Gestation stalls are one of the worst examples of the industrialization of animal agriculture. They are metal crates whose dimensions are two metres by 0.6 metres, in which the female pigs (sows) are housed from the age of six months until they are culled at around two years of age. The sows are only moved out of those stalls a few days before they give birth, at which point they are transferred to farrowing stalls that have the same size restrictions for the sow, but have some room around the edges for the piglets to move around.
Sows spend their entire lives having to eat, sleep and relieve themselves in the same mind-numbing tiny space, with no ability to turn around or even walk.
The use of these stalls is not only inhumane, but contributes to the concentration of thousands of animals in small spaces producing vast amounts of manure that is then applied to nearby land. Manitoba claims the dubious distinction of having the highest number of pigs per farm, 5,563 — more than double the next highest in Quebec, at 2,350.
Many other countries around the world have already stopped the use of gestation stalls, including the EU, the UK and Australia. It is long past time for Canada to follow suit and stop this inhumane practice, and for Canadians to vehemently oppose ag-gag legislation within Manitoba.
The Winnipeg Humane Society and Hog Watch Manitoba urge supporters to contact their MLAs and demand that they oppose the proposed ag-gag legislation becoming law in Manitoba.
Vicki Burns is a member of the Hog Watch Manitoba steering committee and Brittany Semeniuk is an animal welfare consultant with the Winnipeg Humane Society.
