Canada Bans Gestation Crates for Pigs

http://www.care2.com/causes/success-canada-bans-gestation-crates-for-pigs.html



Thanks to 37,000 Care2 members taking action, the more than one million pregnant pigs on Canadian farms will not have to spend their lives confined in a space so small they can’t even turn around. A Care2 petition demanded an urgent response to help mother pigs — and Canada’s National Farm Animal Care Council and the Canadian Pork Council have created new regulations that ban the continuous confinement of sows.

A new Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs has just been released. Significantly, the new Code of Practice includes a long-overdue ban on continuously confining pregnant sows in gestation crates which, in an age of industrial-scale farming, have become a standard practice in North America. Facilities that are built or renovated after July 1, 2014 must now have group housing systems for pregnant sows, instead of keeping them in crates barely bigger than their own bodies.

Pig producers, animal welfare and enforcement representatives, researchers, transporters, processors, veterinarians and government representatives all worked in close consultation with a Scientific Committee (with specific expertise in pig behavior, health and welfare) to create Canada’s new regulations. In addition to calling for a ban on gestation crates, the new Code of Practice requires mandatory pain relief for pigs during castration and tail docking.