They didn’t train me, and I’m not familiar with working with farm animals. And so we started with feeding, and then moved right into doing nuts and tails (castration and docking) and clipping the ears. You pick up the pig, you cut the sac, pull the nuts, clip the tail, clip the ear, and give them two shots and put them back in the pen. I had no veterinary experience that would qualify me to perform such medical procedures. I started to cry, because I didn’t want to do it, and because we were pretty hard up at the time, financially we were going to lose our home.

They kept telling me, it doesn’t hurt them, and I said, ‘then why are they squealing?’ They would scream. We kept asking for tools that were sharp enough to get through the sacs quick, and so you wouldn’t have to rip and tug on the sac, and we never got those. They just said you have to use what’s there. No anesthesia was used. I asked if there was a way that they could numb them or anything, and they said no. I just remember someone saying ‘well you hold that like it’s a baby, you act like it’s a baby.’ And for me it was. I wanted to make the pigs as comfortable as I could if I was going to do something horrible like that to it. So I would hold its body against my body, and a co-worker would say, ‘you’re going to get bit, or kicked,’ and I said and don’t I deserve it? I mean, wouldn’t you fight, wouldn’t you want to go get away?

The emphasis of the process is speed. Sometimes they would knock them, meaning they would raise them above their heads, and knock their head on the pavement. It didn’t even matter if they were newborn, if they were ready to ship out, and they were healthy running pigs going to the truck, if they were under five pounds they got picked up and knocked next to the wall or on the pavement. I witnessed one worker raise a pig above his head, and he slammed the pig down on the pavement and he didn’t kill it all the way, and the pig was bleeding from his head, and it’s body was walking around in a circle while its head was on the pavement. And he didn’t even bother to kill the pig completely. He said, ‘that’s what knocking is.’

The stalls that they are in, the mother pig cannot move at all. She can only lay down and stand up, that’s all that she can do. She can’t move backward, she can’t move forward, all she can do is lay down and stand up.

Finally, I just couldn’t do it anymore. We were on our way to work one day and I said I can’t do this, and I was just crying, and I said, I can’t, drop me off here now, I’ll walk home. If only they could imagine what these animals went through to feed us.

- Krysta Jenson is a former worker of Circle Four Farms near Milford, Utah. Circle Four is a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork producer. The above text was transcribed from an interview conducted by the Utah Animal Rights Coalition.

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