Letters

Pig scramble unnecessary and cruel

The Sonoma (CA) County Fair has cancelled pig scrambles—they don’t want to encourage children to bully. Pig scrambles are cruel, including the ones to be held next week at the Cheshire, NH county fair. Piglets don’t want to be greased, chased, bagged any more than you. Pig scrambles, like rodeos, aren’t barnyard fun, but humans abusing animals — piglets and calves — baby animals.

Some pig farmers assert piglets’ squeals, while being chased with no way to escape to their mothers’ protection, are “normal” communications. National Shelter Director Susie Coston of Farm Sanctuary—the country’s largest farmed animal sanctuary–says only traumatized pigs squeal. At scrambles, she says, piglets cry out for their mothers, who would fight to the death to protect their piglets. 

So don’t let farmers, who slaughter pigs—and other animals— for profit, convince you otherwise. Maybe they’ve convinced themselves that sentient beings, whom they kill, do not having feelings and are incapable of suffering. It’s easier to murder animals and have pig scrambles (which are often preludes to their murder) when you don’t consider animals’ emotions.

Bottom line – compassionate people don’t harm animals, especially when there is no nutritional need to eat animals and no moral reason to harm them for entertainment, among other uses. A sick idea of fun, pig scrambles can only exist in the context of systems with unnecessary and endless brutality that feed, clothe, entertain, medicate, and decorate us.

Meg Hurley

Claremont

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