PETA wants those responsible for burying 1,000 pigs alive in Antipolo charged

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is demanding that those responsible for burying more than 1,000 live pigs in Antipolo City be charged with cruelty to animals.

The City Health Office of Antipolo enforced the mass culling of pigs on suspicions that animal disease infected some pigs in Rizal province.

Asked where the order to cull and bury the pigs alive originated from, Department of Agriculture spokesperson Noel Reyes declined to confirm if it was from the department.

“Sorry po … No comment!” Reyes said in a separate message to GMA News Online.

However, hog raisers claimed that the pigs were healthy and had not been proven positive of any disease.

“PETA wants a cruelty-to-animals charge filed against this atrocity,” PETA senior vice president of International Campaigns Jason Baker told GMA News Online.

Baker said the City Health Office’s action broke domestic law and international regulations.

“Not only is this practice inhumane and barbaric, it also contravenes domestic law and international regulations.

“The pigs should have been tested for disease by veterinarians and, if tested positive, humanely euthanized,” he added.

The solution is to stop factory farming methods that facilitate the spread of disease in the first place, Baker noted.

This “atrocity” shows that pigs and other animals raised for food are seen as nothing more than objects exploited for profit, and not living, breathing beings, Baker noted.

“Anyone who finds this deplorable—and everyone should—would be shocked at the routine cruelties in this industry,” he added.

Live burial is an extreme form of physical and mental abuse for intelligent and sensitive animals like pigs, according to PETA.

“Burial processes are often haphazard and ineffective, allowing a limited amount of air to reach the animals so that their death is cruelly and painfully prolonged,” Baker emphasized.

Animals buried alive may suffer for days in “pain and terror, trapped in total darkness, unable to move, ultimately dying slowly of asphyxiation, starvation or dehydration,” he said. —VDS, GMA News