“What am I doing here?”

That’s the question that Justin Reineke routinely asked himself while working on a pig farm in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada.

All the suffering and death was finally too much for him to bear. In a short new documentary released by PETA, he exposes the pig industry’s horrific practices. Justin hopes that by speaking up, he’ll encourage other animal agriculture workers to find the courage to come forward and share their stories.

Baby Pigs Cut and Mutilated—All Without Any Pain Relief

Within a day or two of piglets’ births, workers take them from their mothers, clip their teeth, and chop off their tails with crude implements like gardening shears. In the video, untrained workers cut into piglets’ scrotums and pull out their testicles.

Throughout these horrific mutilations, the piglets scream and flail in pain. We can only imagine the agony every single one of them experienced.

In the birthing areas, Justin first encountered “thumping” and “smashing the pigs on the ground that were deemed not going to make it.” In the video, workers slam struggling baby pigs to the concrete floor. Their bodies shake and jerk violently as they die slowly in piles of feces and smashed corpses. This is standard practice in the pig-farming industry.

Rotting pig parts and carcasses contribute to the filth and disease of pig farms. Stressed mother pigs are imprisoned on concrete inside cold metal crates so cramped that they can’t even turn around. They spend every moment lying in their own feces and urine.

As our world comes to terms with the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re experiencing firsthand how exploiting animals can lead to the spread of dangerous diseases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Approximately 75 percent of recently emerging infectious diseases affecting people began as diseases in animals.”

Some influenza viruses originated in chickens and pigs. Health authorities confirm that influenza viruses and coronaviruses are zoonotic (transmissible from other animals to humans)—and farms and markets crammed full of stressed animals are breeding grounds for such deadly maladies.

Workers Desensitized to Extreme Violence and Suffering

Justin was only 17 when he first started mutilating and killing baby pigs at work. He could feel himself becoming emotionally stunted. His wife, Carolina, recalled his struggles with fighting and drug abuse, symptoms of the toll the job was taking on him.

“If you’re violent with animals, you’ll be violent in your everyday life,” Justin says. Studies have shown that those who commit violent acts toward animals often go on to hurt humans.

Sometimes, workers bond with the younger pigs only to have to betray their trust later, as Justin says, by breeding and raping them. The pigs who had once looked at the humans with curiosity began to cower in fear. Workers forcibly impregnate sows over and over again.

When it came time to kill the older pigs used for breeding, Justin says, workers attached 220-volt electrical cables to a pig’s ear and tail and ran the voltage through the animal for up to five minutes.

“The animal just stood there and stared at us and drooled,” Justin recalled. He said that it felt as though, through that last gaze, the pig was asking, “Why are you doing this to me?”

These moments of connection with the pigs was what caused Justin to start really thinking about the situation. He realized that he’d become numb to violence in general.

“People don’t understand that they’re paying for this,” Carolina told PETA. “They don’t understand what is going on with these animals.”

‘If You Feel Like It’s Wrong, It’s Wrong.’

Most humans wouldn’t dream of keeping their dog in a cramped, dank warehouse on a slab of concrete covered with feces—even though pigs can experience pain, joy, fear, and misery, just as dogs can,

After years in the industry, Justin quit his job and went vegan—and he even rescued a pig named Bubba. At home, Bubba digs around in the yard and curls up in a comfortable, warm bed. He gets to show his personality, a chance that stir-crazy pigs imprisoned inside barns never have.

Bubba is quite vocal, and his family loves hearing the wide array of oinks, grunts, and squeals that he uses to communicate. Justin tells us that just like dogs, pigs wag their tails when happy or excited and like to flop over for much-appreciated tummy rubs.

“It’s fun to see them in a happy environment after seeing them in such a sad environment,” he says, thinking about Bubba in comparison to the pigs on the farm.

Help Prevent Pigs From Suffering in Slaughterhouses—Don’t Eat Them

Be like Justin—make the connection. Treating living, feeling beings like money-making machines is wrong.

It’s speciesist to think that humans are superior and therefore somehow justified in raping, caging, and mutilating animals who don’t look exactly like us. Go vegan today to spare nearly 200 animals a year a horrifying, painful death, simply by leaving them off your plate.

Luckily, it’s easier than ever to eat vegan—even for the most culinarily challenged among us. There’s a vegan recipe for any food you can imagine! Get started today by ordering a free vegan starter kit from PETA:

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