My name is Paloma and I have been working in a factory farm all my life. The work is harsh, because they impregnate me over and over, and the cycle goes like this: get pregnant, wait around eating and sleeping til the babies grow inside, then the births. Then I stay in the damn farrowing crate while the babies nurse. Then the take the babies. Then they impregnate me again. Over and over. Til I just wore out. The men came and tested me and I failed and they spray painted my back and put me on a truck. Brought me here and here I am. Waiting. It's hot here, and I am so so tired. I just don't want to do much but sleep. I sometimes wonder if something good might happen. It seems like it might. I don't know what "something good" might be, but I will know it when it gets here. #JusticeForWallacePigs
my name is Precious. i don't know where i am or what is happening. i am not well. my brain is on fire. i can't see well. my friend walked off and i don't know if she's coming back. there's no food here. i haven't found the water. i am too tired to get up and look for it. it's hot here, like at the other place, but not as hot as on the moving barn. that was terrible and so scary. i am so dry. maybe tomorrow i will look for water. if i feel like it. i am going to take a nap now. maybe i will feel better when i wake up. maybe my friend will come back. maybe there will be food.
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Gay
15Jul17
This is Gay. She is sweet and gentle, and always nuzzles her friends hello. She hasn't an unkind bone in her body. She feels old and tired, from birthing meat babies to make money for a bunch of men, but she never complains. She is waiting here, in this hot hell hole, with no food, and no breezes to cool her poor old body. She is waiting with patience, letting time pass. She knows not to expect any good things, but she doesn't know about the last bad things. The long ride in the terrible heat and then the stunning and hanging and stripping down to her bones. She doesn't know they plan to make her into sausages. She is worth far more than they know. She would make the finest friend. They only see dollar signs. We know she is so much more. Tell people about beautiful Gay. #JusticeForWallacePigs
This is Wen. She's hot, dirty, tired, lame, hungry, and beyond expecting anything to improve. She's spent 2.5 years in a farrowing crate, and now she moves like she's 100 though she's only 4 years old. She is world weary and about to be made into Bob Evans sausages. Tell people about Wen. Tell everyone she lived. #JusticeForWallacePigs
I am sitting here in this place of woe with my friends and my strangers, who are all my sisters. We've done what they forced us to do, for as long as we could, til our bodies broke from the doing. Our reward is death. We will be eaten now. Just another day or two of this life, and then the long nothing. No rainbow bridge waits for us. Remember me. Think of me as Anne and tell people that I was, tell people that we were. #JusticeForWallacePigs
every week i try to meet and love hundreds of innocents, but it is not possible to make that connection with so many when there is so little time. i am always surprised and moved by how many of these ladies make and hold eye contract with me, and i always think of that winston churchill quote about pigs seeing us as equals. there really is something to that, i think. there are always lovelies whose faces and gazes stab like a dagger in my heart. one such lovely is this young woman. call her Aggie, the innocent one. she has little lumps, one on her head above her right eye. i didn't get a clear photo of her. you'll see her just for a second in the video clip, with her friends (l-r) Najila and Alba. i wish i had been able to stay with them a long while. i wish i could have, would have given them food, water, baths, home. forever home. something we sometimes give dogs, or cats, or humans we come across who are in need. it is illegal to provide such things to these souls because they are owned by another, one who sees only the dollar signs in them. dearest Aggie, be calm and peaceful and warm with your beautiful friends Najila, who has the most beautiful deep brown eyes, and Alba, who feels stronger and calmer than some. comfort one another now, and up the ramp into the trailer. down the highways so noisy and fast and windy frightening. when you are so thirsty it makes you sick, and when Najila is so scared she pees and cries, and when Alba doesn't feel so strong. when they force you into the last bad place and end your lives. for every moment from now until then, stay together and help each other. i don't know if i'll ever stop crying. i will think of these friends and of the lumps on Aggies head and i will wish forever that we could have left the bad places together. please think good thoughts for these three, til it's over...monday very late or tuesday early in the tennesse abbatoir that awaits them.
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Diane
24Jun17
Say hello to Diane. She has 3 days left in the world. Then her life will be extinguished and her body ground into breakfast sausages, shaped into patties and refrigerated for sale in our grocery stores. Nothing of her will remain but these photos. Even her lovely head exists only to be eaten. Diane could live for years if they would let her. "They" are the men who controlled her birth, life, servitude, and every moment from before her mother's mother's mother was ever born. She comes from a long line of the damned. But she has within her everything she needs to be a happy and healthy pig, if they let her. This is why animal activists beg folks to try vegan food options. It's never been easier, in most places, to explore vegan substitutes for meats, cheeses, and more. Today is a good day to try something new and to consider something different for yourself, if you never have before. Think of Diane and boycott animal agriculture as often and as thoroughly as you can (and yes, you can <3). Do this in Diane's name and for all her beautiful, never to be known, never to be named descendents. One day you might stand with me in asking for peace, mercy, and justice for all farmed animals. #JusticeForWallacePigs #BeKindBeVegan
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Yorna
27mar17
This is Yorna. She was nursing her doomed babies as well as she could from inside the confines of the farrowing crate. Then the man came by, looking at her stats on his clipboard, and made a decision. He marked her, literally, with spray paint on her back, indicating to other men that she was meant for slaughter. Now she stands here, her breasts full of milk meant for the babies who were forced on her, then forced away from her. She needs to nurse.
I only recently understood this about the cull sows in the pens in this place. Go back far enough in my stories from here and you'll find me writing that I thought some had mastitis. That is because the truth, though it seems so obvious now, was too horrible to imagine or face, so I didn't see the obvious. I wrote once of a milky discharge one pig had, unable to see that it was breast milk. She, too, needed to nurse her babies. I woke up most fully the day I saw a dead newborn baby in one of the pens, her mom sitting in a corner staring ahead. That whole day the magnitude of their horrors came to me in full, and now I know things that are nearly beyond belief.
Today Yorna is being trucked to a cull sow slaughterhouse, probably the big one about 850 miles away. Her breasts will be sliced and packaged and eaten by our friends and family, but I will remember her like this, beautiful and alive and worthy of so much more.
This is Evangeline. She lived on a sow farm in NC for 5 years before she was shipped off to this holding pen, and then to slaughter at a rendering facility. She was so hungry, but her pen did not receive any food from the workers, so she had to do without food for days. None before transport to the holding pens. None at the pens. None after. None going to slaughter. None at the slaughterhouse. Many days with no food. For all of her life, she was impregnated by cafo workers, then forced to lie on her side as her babies nursed. She spent a total of 42 months in that low, pig shaped cage. She gave birth to many children, all of whom were slaughtered for meat at age 6 months. She never got to know any of them. She never even got to kiss and snuggle them, or show them how to root. She never got to do any pig things herself, either.
Evangeline was strong, and fat, and healthy, for a long time. So they used her for a long time. Then she got weaker, and thinner, and she no longer met the criteria for being a breeding sow. Dear Evangeline, sad, tired, innocent child. May the system that used and abused you now end, and may all beings be free from such suffering ever again. I am so sorry that your life was so damn hard and harsh.