Smithfield: One pig is slaughtered every two seconds...

One Smithfield worker described the brutality: “The line is so fast that there is no time to sharpen the knife. The knife gets dull, and you have to cut harder.

Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around.

Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death.

There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth.

The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits.

The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

Source: Petition: Smithfield Food's brutality to pigs and environment must stop!
Author: Petition