If you eat pork, bacon or ham, this is a video you need to watch.

To explore how pigs become pork in Australia, I recently visited Riverlea in Corowa, NSW – the largest piggery in the southern hemisphere.

In Australia, 4.7 million pigs are killed every single year, with up to a million of these pigs coming from Riverlea alone. At any one time, 45,000 pigs are kept at Riverlea, confined in farrowing crates too small to move in, and forced to produce piglets and fattened up for Christmas hams.

The scale of their suffering is unimaginable. A million pigs is not just a number – they’re lives lived in misery and unbearable pain, and cruel, unnecessary deaths. Every farmed pig is an individual who feels pain and despair, and is forced to endure industry-standard cruelty like:

The cutting of piglets’ tails, teeth and ears at a few days of age without anaesthetic

The confining of pregnant and lactating sows to tiny cages in farrowing crates

Dead and dying piglets within farrowing crates

Sows with wounds and injuries including prolapsed vaginas

These are all incidents that have been recorded at Riverlea.

And for what? Why does all this suffering have to happen?

It doesn’t. We can change what we are eating, or rather WHO we are eating.

A Christmas ham may be tradition, but as humans, one of our greatest strengths is our ability to use empathy, creativity, and technology to adapt and evolve. And evolve we must. By leaving animals off our plate we can end animal suffering and improve our health and the state of our environment, while also avoiding zoonotic diseases that result in global pandemics like the one we continue to live through.

As we near the end of 2020, it’s never been more relevant to kick animal products to the curb. And while the festive season should be a time of peace and joy, as long as people eat animal products, holiday mealtimes will revolve around the hidden torture and misery of beings who did not want to die.

And this is why we have to speak up – for pigs, and for all animals. Until every battery cage and every farrowing crate is empty.

Thanking you for your support, and wishing you a kinder 2021,

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Photos and statistics provided by

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Resources to ditch animal products and live a kinder life: