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An activist has said that she experienced “muscle wastage” in the first 10 days of a 21-day protest inside a real pig farrowing crate.
Animal Rising campaigner Michelle Farnham has now spent three weeks in the crate, which is outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, London, to highlight the oppressive conditions experienced by farm animals in the UK.
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Farnham has been inside the crate for 24 hours a day, and has a team of activists offering support and ensuring that she is safe. By day 10, she began experiencing physical deterioration after spending so much time inside the cramped cage.
In an interview with Viva! that the charity shared to Instagram, Farnham said, “It’s funny how you start to notice your body kind of deteriorate. In the past couple of days I really noticed my legs starting to get a lot weaker. We know there is going to be a level of muscle wastage and I can feel that happening, which is really strange.”
In a statement, Animal Rising noted that Farnham’s experience includes “a fraction” of the confinement that is imposed on female pigs, or sows.
A typical factory-farmed sow spends nearly a quarter of her adult breeding life inside a farrowing crate, a metal cage designed to confine pigs before and after they give birth. In such extreme confinement, sows experience mental distress and wounds.
“I want people to see just how restrictive and abhorrent the factory farming system is,” Farnham said. “I’ve seen firsthand the physical and psychological suffering these crates cause. Right now, tens of thousands of mother pigs are confined in farrowing crates just like this one, unable even to turn around.”
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‘This is just one example of the suffering built into factory farming’
Farnham’s protest against the continued use of farrowing crates is one part of Animal Rising’s new End Factory Farming campaign. The group is calling on the UK government to commit to ending factory farming entirely by 2040.
Animal Rising recently unveiled new footage documenting a month in the life of Luna, a sow confined at Red Court Farm in Ipswich, and is also calling on the farm to release Luna into a sanctuary. According to the government’s own Animal Welfare Strategy, roughly 92 percent of indoor pig farming systems use farrowing crates.
Farnham said, “This is just one example of the suffering built into factory farming. We don’t have to accept this system – we’re asking the government to bring an end to factory farming for good.”
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