Shropshire Star

Letter: Pigs deserve better than the grim life ahead in barren sheds

Pigs, apparently, love to play football and investigate their environment; to do, in short, the things that give them pleasure, just as we do.

Published

Not much hope of that, in the proposed pig farm near Market Drayton. No mention of how the pigs might feel, spending their brief lives in barren sheds, regarded simply as "batches", commodities to be used without reference to their needs.

Winston Churchill said,"Dogs look up to man. Cats look down on man. Pigs look us straight in the eye and see an equal."

They are "extraordinarily intelligent . . . curious and insightful . . . widely regarded as being smarter than . . children of at least three years of age." They form close bonds and like to snuggle up to one another.

So how come none of this is mentioned in this planning application? Anyone who regards pigs simply in terms of "batches", products, a means of bringing in money, is not really fit to have responsibility for these sensitive and intelligent animals.

So where do these "batches" of little piggies go, when they leave this super-clean and disinfected paradise? Off to China or some other 1,000 mile journey, to be tortured and abused, before they finally meet their maker?

We fought so hard in this country for the banning of live animal exports and won that battle.

Then the wonderful EU determined, that, in the name of trade, the ban must be over-turned. Animals could be sent off to countries that have zero tolerance for animal rights and welfare, but that's OK, because its good for trade, the God of all bureaucrats.

Yet another atrocious piece of interfering from the EU, not known, as are we, for being animal lovers.

Do we deserve what we get? If this planning application gets the green light, then possibly we do. What we do to others we can expect to experience ourselves in some way or other.

If we really want to break free from the shackles of Brussels, perhaps we should allow other creatures some of the freedoms we expect for ourselves.

N Jones, Shrewsbury

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