This looks like a bad trend:
Farmers have been castrating piglets for thousands of years, which is good for the people who eat them but not so good for the piglets.
“Sometimes they get depressed,” says Bente Fredriksen, co-coordinator of a $13.8 million Norwegian research project looking into alternatives to castration. Studies by Europe’s food-safety agency found castrated piglets suckle less and spend more time apart from their siblings.
Responding to such concerns, and to animal-welfare groups’ claims that the process causes piglets unnecessary pain, Norway’s Parliament banned the castration of piglets starting in 2009. But that’s causing a new constituency to squeal.
To many people, the meat of uncastrated male pigs has an objectional taste known in the pig trade as “boar taint.” And the ban could cost Norway’s 3,000 pig farmers millions of dollars as they trash tons of boar meat many consumers won’t touch, according to Animalia, a Norwegian meat-industry research group.[...]
Since 1997, the European Union has officially recognized animals as sentient beings able to feel pain and emotion. Norway isn’t part of the EU, but it boasts an even more expansive animal-rights code. Norwegian pigpens, for example, must have largely solid floors strewn with something soft, like straw or wood chips, so pigs can lie down comfortably. In the U.S., pigpen floors are mostly hard and grated.
“It’s important to me how the pigs are doing,” said 27-year-old Elin Braaten, after shopping at a downtown Oslo supermarket. She said she hadn’t heard about the coming ban on piglet-castration. But she likes the sound of it. If she ends up with any foul-tasting pork, she says: “I’ll just start buying more lamb.”
She’ll start buying more lamb, until they come after the lamb producers I suppose.
Read more here.
Previously: War on Food
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4 Responses to “Norwegian Pigs”
August 6th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
The Other Humane Meat?…
This Wall Street Journal article about a European debate over whether piglets bound for someone’s dinner table should be castrated offers a fascinating look into our weird relationship with the animals we eat. The issue is the effects of castration……
August 9th, 2007 at 10:52 am
They don’t castrate lambs, or calves–they used to but stopped. Time the pig producers did too?
August 10th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Bull calves are indeed still castrated, though there is more interest now in alternatives. The reason for castration in pigs is completely different: boar taint is a serious quality defect and occurs in many uncastrated pigs. Meat quality issues in uncastrated males are far less problematic in sheep and cattle. There is work going on to find acceptable alternatives to castration in pigs, but it will not be possible to just stop castrating.
August 13th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Most people I know of still do castrate calves, lambs and pigs. I question the necessity. We don’t castrate our lamb or pigs. All of them taste just fine intact. Research shows that at market age the vast majority of pigs don’t have boar taint. Go here to read more about this topic if you care about sustainable and humane farming:
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/blog/2007/08/hi-tech-vs-boar-taint.html
The recent Wall Street Journal article is more of a sales pitch for high tech ‘solutions’ to a problem we don’t have. We don’t need to waste money paying drug companies for a immuno-castration vaccine or AI companies for sex selection.
On the other hand, it is not the government’s business to be telling us what to do. They have more important things like war and building bridges. We don’t need them micromanaging our lives – a government ban on castration is wrong. This is an issue that should be decided in the market place. If you, and I, don’t like castration, then support your local farmers who don’t castrate. Vote with your dollars.
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