Michelle Farnham knew the crate would be restrictive. What she did not expect was how quickly her body would begin to deteriorate.
The Animal Rising campaigner spent 21 days inside a real pig farrowing crate in Trafalgar Square to demonstrate the conditions imposed on sows in British farming. By day 10, she said her legs had become noticeably weaker and she could already feel what she described as “muscle wastage”.
Ten days. And Farnham had advantages the pigs do not. She chose to enter. She knew she would leave. She had activists around her making sure she was safe. She understood why she was there.
A sow understands none of that.
Farrowing crates are metal cages used to confine pigs before and after they give birth. They are so restrictive that the animals cannot even turn around, and confinement can cause both psychological distress and physical wounds.
This is hardly a new problem.
In 2018, Herbivore Club petitioned the UK government to ban farrowing crates.
The government responded that it “aims to make farrowing crates unnecessary”, but argued that alternatives for indoor farming were not sufficiently advanced. At the time, it said approximately 60% of UK sows were confined in them.
Eight years later, the crates are still here.
Worse, the government’s own Animal Welfare Strategy now says around 92% of indoor pig farming systems use farrowing crates. A typical sow may spend nearly a quarter of her adult breeding life confined in one.
How many more years does an industry need to work out that a mother should be able to turn around?
The problem is bigger than the design of the cage anyway. Farrowing crates only make sense once we accept the premise underneath them: that a pig’s body belongs to us. That we are entitled to impregnate her, confine her, take her piglets and do it again, while arguing over how much movement she should be permitted in the process.
That is how a rights violation gets reduced to an engineering problem.
Animal Rising is calling for factory farming to end by 2040. Farnham’s protest demonstrates just how extreme one part of that system is, but replacing a farrowing crate with a roomier form of exploitation would not resolve the underlying injustice. A pig does not need us to spend another 8 years designing a better cage. She needs us to stop treating her body as ours.