HOGWOOD: a modern horror story

Yes. The vast majority of ‘meat’ pigs in the UK are reared in factory farms, with only three per cent of pigs raised for slaughter spending their whole lives outdoors. Conditions found at Hogwood farm typify standard pig farming practices and conditions; routine mutilations, limited space for the animals, no access to the outdoors and a barren, highly unnatural environment with concrete or slatted floors and little or no bedding.

Mothers at Hogwood give birth in crates (called farrowing crates) which severely restrict their movement. This is a common practice in the UK with approximately 60 per cent of UK sows giving birth in these cruel contraptions. The mother is usually put in the crate a week before she is due to give birth and kept there for a further month, until her piglets are forcibly weaned and taken from her.

Farrowing crates are legal in the UK and widely used. The sow stall is, however, illegal where mother pigs are kept in metal-barred stalls permanently. Instead in the UK, whilst they are pregnant indoor mother pigs are kept in groups in barren cells with nothing whatsoever to do and then give birth in crates.

Many of the conditions found at Hogwood farm comply with the bare minimum ‘code of recommendations for the welfare of livestock’, set out by the Government. What Viva!’s footage shows is the abysmal reality of these poor standards, that are supposedly in place to protect animal welfare. The RSPCA indicated that there was no legal action they could or would take on the farm, even though they were concerned about the welfare of the pigs, stating ‘[this footage] highlights the inadequacy of the law to protect the welfare of pigs’.

Viva! received a tip-off from a concerned member of the public about the conditions inside Hogwood. Following an initial visit to the farm in Spring 2017, Viva! launched a full investigation and subsequent campaign urging the Government to take action and for Tesco to drop the farm as a supplier.

About 10 million a year. That’s about 200,000 every week, 27,000 a day and over 1,000 every single hour.

• Pigs bred for meat are killed at around six months old.
• Mother pigs are killed at three to five years old.
• Breeding boars are killed at three to four years old.

It depends on the breed and conditions and varies widely from eight to 27 years.

1.2 billion land animals are slaughtered for food in the UK every year. In addition, over one billion fish and 4.4 billion shellfish are killed, totalling over 6.6 billion animals killed.

Find out more here: viva.org.uk/animals/number-animals-killed/

Over three quarters of land animals killed for food in the UK are factory farmed, totalling around 900 million animals every year.

Assured Food Standards licenses the Red Tractor label; it was launched in 2000 by the National Farmers Union of England and Wales. If a farmer wants to have their produce marked as Red Tractor Assured, they pay a licence fee each year and are inspected by Red Tractor. It is run by the farming industry for the farming industry.

Red Tractor stated that they didn’t find any breaches of animal welfare.

On 21 September 2017, Tesco responded to Viva!’s first investigation by stating that “we are satisfied with the conditions, and that the animals are treated well”. They took no action over any of the footage Viva! showed them. Following two years of pressure and two more investigations, on 20 August 2019 Tesco decided that “these are distressing and unacceptable scenes […] fall well below the high animal welfare standards we require from all of our suppliers”. They dropped Hogwood as a pork supplier.

In the Banbury Guardian on 26 June 2017, the RSPCA stated that it was “concerned about the welfare” of the pigs and “sadly, in general, the conditions seen in the footage appear to be compliant with legal requirements, which highlights the inadequacy of the law to protect the welfare of pigs”.

Viva! reported the farm to the Government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) following each investigation; the Government did not take any action against the farm.

The carcasses of pigs; Viva! found skulls and other remains of pigs around the farm. The plastic ear tags remained as identification that they were farmed animals. This is now an illegal act in the UK and as far as we are aware, Hogwood no longer dump carcasses there.

The investigation has gained extensive media coverage, including national exclusives in the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Sun. For a full list of coverage see here: viva.org.uk/animals/campaigns/hogwood/hogwood-press

When it became apparent that Red Tractor, Tesco and the government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) were not going to take any action, Viva! launched a nationwide campaign, with protestors outside over 150 Tesco stores. A video van showed the reality of Hogwood’s conditions to Tesco customers, and volunteers and staff informed people of the reality of what was happening inside one of Tesco’s pork suppliers.

Viva! also took to the streets with our FaceOff campaign, asking members of the public to view Hogwood footage. For more information on FaceOff outreach and to see how the public reacted, see here: viva.org.uk/faceoff/pigs/face

On 20 August 2019, Tesco cancelled its partnership with Hogwood, while Red Tractor suspended Hogwood’s membership to the assurance scheme. Cranswick plc, one of the UK’s largest food producers, described the footage as “indefensible” and decided to “permanently cease accepting any future deliveries from Hogwood farm”.

The NHS has reported that antibiotic use in farmed animals threatens human health; by using antibiotics on farmed animals, harmful strains of bacteria can mutate to become resistant to the antibiotics and render them ineffective, not just in farmed animals but also in humans. Bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics are known as ‘superbugs’, which worldwide, already result in 1.27 million deaths a year.

It is estimated that the number of people who die from antibiotic resistance will be more than the number of people who die from cancer by 2050 (around 10 million per year worldwide) unless urgent action is taken, including a severe restriction on the use of antibiotics in animal farming and a decrease in animal consumption.

In farms such as Hogwood, a typical factory farm, the animals are kept in unnatural and unhygienic environments that lead to poor health; many would not reach slaughter weight, or survive long enough to be slaughtered, without the use of antibiotics. They are weaned at a fraction of their natural weaning age, leaving their guts underdeveloped and their immune systems weak. They’re kept in close confinement with no opportunity to separate their living area with their toilet and are fed unnatural diets made up of things like cereals, soya, oils and fishmeal.

The United Nations, and even the industry itself, has described animal farming’s use of antibiotics as a threat to human health. The only guaranteed way of reducing antibiotic use in agriculture is by turning to vegan products.

Pigs are susceptible to many diseases in confined, intensive units. Early weaning causes huge stress to young piglets and profoundly alters their immune systems so that scouring (severe diarrhoea) is a major problem. Piglets are dosed with drugs on a daily basis to counteract this. Respiratory disease is a huge concern in older animals, as is pleuropneumonia, ‘blue ear’, porcine respiratory disease complex, pneumonic pasteurellosis, as well as Salmonella and E. coli outbreaks and many other diseases.

See Viva!’s report: Factory farms, a breeding ground for disease.

Pigs at Hogwood have their tails docked. Tail docking is routinely inflicted on over four fifths of pigs across the UK in an attempt to stop tail biting. The lower part of the tail is cut off (without anaesthetic or painkillers) making the remainder of the tail more sensitive – the idea being that pigs more quickly escape each other when they are being bitten!

Tail biting is an abnormal behaviour not seen in wild animals – and is caused directly by the poor conditions the pigs live in. It is known that the complete lack of foraging materials, overcrowding, poor air quality (that can harm the pig’s respiratory system) and poor, boring diets all contribute to this behaviour.

Our investigators follow stringent biosecurity practices at all times – wearing clean clothing, disposable coveralls, gloves and shoe covers (if disinfectant foot dips are not available on site), and observing sufficient down-time between entry to different farms.

In the UK, trespass is a civil matter and in most cases it’s the only way consumers are able to see inside these places for themselves. Our investigators gain access, without any damage, through gates or doors in order to shine a spotlight in the dark corners of animal agriculture. Most people would agree that entry on to a factory farm to film the conditions of the animals is a justifiable action that is in the public interest.

The footage captured by brave investigators has led to national debate, people changing their eating habits to be less cruel and more environmentally friendly and to policy reforms.

Cranswick plc, one of the largest UK producers of food, decided to “permanently cease accepting any future deliveries from Hogwood farm”, while Tesco dropped their partnership and Red Tractor suspended the farm’s licence after Viva!’s fourth investigation. This has meant that it would be extremely difficult to find any large-scale company who would want to associate with Hogwood.

Viva! does not know the exact situation, but it is likely that Hogwood has decreased the number of pigs it breeds, rears and slaughters as a result of losing these major business partners.

Viva!’s main aim is to expose the reality of modern British farming to the public and allow people to have a more informed choice on whether they want to fund animal industries once they see what standard practice with farmed animals looks like.

Yes it is. Pork has an image problem. Bacon and ham are processed meats, which the World Health Organisation categorise as a Class 1 carcinogen (ie known to cause cancer). A huge body of evidence supports the links between processed meat and bowel cancer and a number of mechanisms how it does so have been suggested.

Pork medallions or chops for example, are classed as a red meat, which the WHO say probably causes cancer… For this reason, the industry has unsuccessfully tried to reclassify pork as a white meat.

From 1987 to 2011 the US National Pork Board ran the advertising slogan Pork. The Other White Meat in an effort to suggest that pork was healthier than other red meats. However, neither the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) nor the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) classifies pork as a white meat.

More recently, the ‘Love Pork’ campaign from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) – a levy board funded by farmers – ran TV ads claiming that pork is just as healthy as chicken. Not a great claim as modern supermarket chickens now provide more calories from fat than protein. The AHDB ads are littered with caveats explaining at the foot of the page in small writing that you have to trim off any visible fat. So pork is low in fat, if you remove the fat!. lovepork.co.uk/pork-and-healthy-eating/

Pork is not a healthy food and there are no studies saying you should eat five sausages a day! For more info see viva.org.uk/health/why-animal-products-harm/meat/

White meat is not the answer either. With every year it’s become a less and less healthy product, with almost eight times as much fat in a kilo of chicken as there was in 1870, less iron, less phosphorus and less omega-3 fats, all as a result of modern methods of breeding and rearing chickens. viva.org.uk/materials/white-meat-myths-guide/

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Researchers from the University of Oxford published a study in 2018 in Science which analysed data from almost 40,000 farms around the world, including the UK, and remains the most comprehensive study to date on the environmental impact of plant and animal foods. They looked at the impacts of 40 food products that represent 90 per cent of all that is eaten and found that meat, fish, dairy and egg production uses around 80 per cent of global farmland and produces 60 per cent of food’s greenhouse gas emissions but provides just 18 per cent of the calories we eat and 37 per cent of our protein. The peer-reviewed research concluded that the single biggest action we can take for the planet is to go vegan.

More recently, a study published in Nature Food looking at the diets of 55,000 people in the UK as well as data from 38,000 farms in 119 countries found vegan diets resulted in 75 per cent less climate-heating emissions, water pollution and land use than meat-rich diets. Vegan diets, they say, also cut the destruction of wildlife by 66 per cent and water use by 54 per cent.

For more information please see viva.org.uk/vegan-now and viva.org.uk/eating-the-earth/

Amazing! So many people say that going vegan is undoubtedly the best decision that they have ever made. We are dedicated to making the transition to veganism as easy as possible and so all our resources are free to use. Try viva.org.uk/lifestyle/going-vegan

Please see veganrecipeclub.org.uk for hundreds of tried-and-tested vegan recipes and v30.viva.org.uk for free meal plans for 30 days along with tips on the way.

And if you ever have a burning vegan question you can always drop our experts a question at info@viva.org.uk or give us a call on 0117 944 1000 (Mon-Fri, 9-6).