Livestock farm is one of the most successful business on human history. Yes, everybody need to eat and livestock animals provide it to us. This is very profitable business you everyone could try – as long as you like animals, though. You could see the examples of livestock farm such as healthy goat farm and cattle farm. Not only goat farm or cattle, people also farm sheep, farming chickens and ducks. These are many animals now days like to breed as livestock. Livestock animals not only dominated by mammals, but also fishes, dear friends.
For instances, people these days has turned water crab into a farm animal. Not to mention all those pond creatures such as catfish, gourami, snapper, and shrimp – in short, yes, everyone love these livestock. But, there’s one other popular livestock I didn’t mention yet, did you know what it is? Yup, the pink fat animal: the pig. I know, not every people allow eating pig’ meat (due religious and cultural reasons), but we can’t deny that pig is one of the most popular livestock world-wide.
I myself never eat this piggy meat before (due the health issues), but people (who ate it) said that pork meat taste somehow between lamb and chicken meat (but, I can’t still picture it, though). If it well-done cooked, pork meat would exhibit satisfying flavor which would spoil all the lovers of pork meat. However, as one of successful livestock business, there’s scary fact that happened upon those piggies. Yes, some factories decided to cut off every tail of piggies. Wait, what? Why the tail need to be cut? Here’s a reason why some factory farms need to cut the piggies’ tail off.
Cut the Pig’ Tail
It’s extremely disturbing and scary to imagine those piggies need to loose their tails. But, to be clear, folks, this method is not occurred in every pig’ farm – only some, but well, we also couldn’t tell you the number of factory that actively cut the tail and that doesn’t. The piggies cut methods was widely known as til docking. There’s a lot controversy surround this method and most of it was associated with the animal welfare. But, before we talk further about mistreat of tail docking on pigs, we would talk about a reason why some factory farms need to cut the piggies’ tail off.
First of all, people, you need to know about one condition associated with pig’ behavior that happened almost in every pig farm business. It’s called tail biting; as clear as the names, domestic pigs has a common behavior of biting tail. Whose tail? Each other tail. A farm able to accommodate hundreds – even thousands of pigs (depend on how large the farm is), and all those pigs perform this kind of problematic behavior. They bite other pig’ tail, what would you think would happen?
The problem of this problematic problem leads to future health issue of the pig itself. The wounds (caused by the bite) potentially leads to carcass condemnations and infection. If that happen, could you imagine economic loss that would bare by the farm or industry? Therefore, the tail docking on pigs all done due to prevent the bite behavior of the pig itself. So, how those people perform tail docking? They would perform amputation of part of the pig’ tail (lower half of the pig’ tail). Yes, the problem is solved but is that okay for the pig?
No, let me tell you, it’s never okay for the docked pigs. Once the amputation is done, it also induces pain for those poor pigs. The overwhelmed pain pig’ felt leads to an acute stress for the pigs. Therefore, EU already banned the tail docking on pig which is all written in Council Directive 2008/EC, Annex 1; but, based on the regulation, breeders still allowed to perform tail docking due ineffective other methods to prevent pigs from tail biting.
One information you should knew, that the wild pig doesn’t have this behavior of domesticated pigs. Apparently, the tail biting was exhibited due the poor condition of factories farms. The farm management was failed to satisfied pig’ behavioral needs.