Pork Board engages in doublespeak

rocky
15 years ago
Categories: animal welfare

Chair of the NZ Pork Industry Board Chris Trengrove told Campbell Live last night, “The industry is changing and has been changing since 2005, we’ve been monitoring those changes, um, we have over half of the industry now out of the stalls altogether…”

He then went on to say that research shows sows stalls are necessary for the safety of the sows.

Likewise from TVNZ on Monday: Trengrove says probably over half the sows in New Zealand are free range outdoors or stall free. He says the industry has been moving away from the use sow stalls for some years down to a point where they will be used for four weeks, for the safety of the sow.

So apparently it is necessary for the safety of sows that they be confined in sow stalls, yet somehow, miraculously over half of the sows in the country are safe not being confined in these stalls?

How gullible does he think we are? This seems to be a classic case of doublespeak. The question is, does Trengrove believe his own lies? George Orwell’s 1984 describes doublethink as:

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

Actually what Trengrove really meant was that if pigs are intensively farmed, sows are safer in individual stalls than cramped together where the confined conditions make them stressed and aggressive. If pigs are farmed free range outdoors, sow stalls are completely unnecessary. Of course Trengrove is unwilling to admit to the public that all intensive indoor farming is cruel and stressful for pigs; he prefers instead to mislead the public by speaking in complete contradictions.

SAFE’s LovePigs campaign website has a nice handy list correcting misleading comments from the pork industry in recent days.

– Rochelle Rees