WARNING: Contains images some may find distressing.
Harrowing footage recorded at a pig farm which supplies UK supermarkets has emerged online.
The distressing scenes of neglect show pigs squeezed into cramped pens, sick animals shaking on cold concrete floors, dead carcasses left to rot and used syringes scattered across the ground.
According to the Daily Star, the video was filmed by activists who visited Marcliff Farm in Driffield, Yorkshire, three times.
They then passed it on to animal rights charity PETA, who posted it to YouTube.
Horrendous scenes shows pigs with open wounds living in filthy pens next to piles of rotting carcasses alongside heaps of discarded syringes used to prevent disease linked to squalid and overcrowded conditions.
The video is just the latest to highlight the awful conditions still in place at some British pig farms and follows an exposé of four pig farms earlier this year.
PETA spokesman Elisa Allen said:
The suffering exposed in this video is not the exception – it is almost certainly the rule.
The RSPCA also described the footage as ‘upsetting’ with a spokesman saying the video clearly showed poor management practice.
He said:
There are issues here such as not placing dead pigs in an appropriate container despite them being removed from their pens.
Medicines should be securely stored and clinical waste disposed of appropriately
There are some pigs that appear ill or injured. In any farming system, animals can become sick and injured but when this occurs they should receive prompt and effective treatment.
However, the man who runs the farm, Neil Warkup told the Daily Star the farm had recently been visited by farm food assurance agency Red Tractor, which had found no faults.
He insisted their deaths had not been cruel:
I work my heart and soul off in this place. It’s soul-destroying. There was a few dead in a shed, they were pulled out ready to be taken away the next morning.
Maybe we should have taken them away, but that’s the only thing we did wrong.
If that’s the only thing they did wrong then farming regulations need a severe overhaul.
