CRUELTY CHARGES FOR HOG FARMS

An interesting trend is the filing of animal cruelty charges against farmers, and I don't take note of all of them, but this is a pretty large-scale incident: "Dozens of cruelty charges [77, to be exact] have been laid after investigators turned up 'an animal welfare disaster' at a series of hog farms in southwestern Ontario." The Globe and Mail story goes on to cite "a brutal environment in which piglets were trampled and eaten at birth by others, where cannibalization was rampant and where some hogs rotted where they died and were eaten by rodents. In other cases, the SPCA said, heaps of corpses had been piled up behind barns and thousands had been dumped into manure tanks." Well, I'm sure it was just an isolated in - er, a series of isolated incidents...