Page 3438 - Week 11 - Thursday, 19 September 2013
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Despite the government’s agreement with Pace Farm, it is now time for the Assembly to take one step further and legislate to end the practice of battery cage farming entirely so that other egg producers cannot commence battery cage operations in the ACT.
This is now the fifth bill introduced into this Assembly by a Greens member to ban battery hens in the ACT. The first bill was passed in 1997. However, as the bill also included provisions banning the sale of caged eggs in the ACT, under the commonwealth Mutual Recognition Act, it needed approval from all other jurisdictions in Australia before the act could commence. As this did not occur, the act has been sitting on our statute books uncommenced for 16 years. This bill removes those provisions to enable the current bill to commence.
The second factory farming practice that this bill seeks to prohibit is the use of sow stalls and gestation crates. Members may be aware that a sow stall is a metal-barred crate used in intensive pig farming. A sow stall houses a single sow for all or part of her 16-week pregnancy. A standard sow stall is just two metres long and 60 centimetres wide. The floor of the stall is usually slatted concrete. The stall has just enough space for the sow to stand up in. She cannot turn around and can only take a short step forward or back.
A few days before giving birth—or farrowing—the sow is moved from a stall to a farrowing crate. Farrowing crates are slightly wider than stalls so that sows can lie down to nurse. They have troughs on each side to physically separate the nursing piglets from their mother. At between two and five weeks of age, piglets are weaned from their mother. She is then returned to a sow stall for mating, and the cycle starts again.
Pork producers claim that the use of sow stalls makes feed management easier in pig farms and prevents pregnant sows from biting each other. The use of farrowing crates prevents the danger of “sow overlay”, where a sow accidently crushes one of her piglets.
But the use of sow stalls and farrowing crates in intensive pig farming severely compromises the welfare of pigs and causes them behavioural, physical and mental suffering. Life for a sow confined to a stall is miserable. The inability to move or exercise leads to painful muscle and bone problems. Sows are unable to engage in the most basic of natural pig behaviours like rooting in the dirt, foraging for food and wallowing in mud to maintain their body temperature.
Pigs that are kept in sow stalls have no opportunity to interact socially with other pigs. Pregnant sows are instinctively motivated to engage in nesting behaviours, but they are prevented from carrying out this behaviour when placed in farrowing crates, which do not provide bedding or nesting material.
I am advised that some scientists believe that pigs are the third most intelligent animal on our planet, following human beings and chimpanzees. In fact, some scientists
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