Sexual Abuse of Pigs and Other Farm Animals Is Nothing New
This week, the Internet is reeling from “#piggate”, the allegations that David Cameron performed a sexual act on a dead pig while at Oxford University.
Most people are understandably horrified at the idea of the sick prank that Cameron has been accused of. A Prime Minister is supposed to protect the most vulnerable among us. If the allegations made by Lord Ashcroft are true, they show callousness and a complete lack of empathy entirely unbefitting a person in such a position and Cameron should resign.
Confined to severely crowded, filthy sheds, most pigs in the UK already endure lives filled with pain and fear and are also denied the opportunity to engage in any type of natural behaviour. They are commonly mutilated, usually without any anaesthetics – for example, by having part of their tails cut off and their teeth ground down. And – something that many people don’t realise – they routinely endure sexual abuse.
Breeding sows on pig farms are forcibly impregnated by having farmers insert tubes of pig semen into their vaginas so that they can keep on churning out piglets. And it’s still perfectly legal in the EU to castrate male pigs without painkillers.
Other animals experience sexual violence, too. Cows used by the dairy industry are forcibly restrained in what farmers refer to as a “rape rack” so that they can be artificially inseminated. And often, factory-farmed turkeys have been genetically manipulated to grow so large that they can no longer breed naturally, so workers must manually extract semen from males and manually inseminate females.
As if this weren’t bad enough, investigations by PETA US paint an even darker picture. Workers on factory farms and in slaughterhouses sexually abuse animals in sadistic ways – for example, by inserting rods into pigs’ anuses or by mimicking raping turkeys before killing them.
This disturbing video shows the sick behaviour that PETA US uncovered:
Nobody should have to endure sexual violence. Please, don’t support the system that abuses animals in this way.
