Sometimes people will say that free-range chicken is a more ethical choice for meat consumers, but if I were a chicken my main objection to the slaughterhouse would not be the accommodations. I’d happily stay in a spartan efficiency if you would only be so nice as to not murder my family and I at check-out time. 

Sujata Gupta of BBC Future has written an interesting article about attempts to make industrial pig farming “more humane,” but the ultimate endgame remains the same, death for the animal and damage to the environment. I think meat will eventually be almost entirely grown in labs from cells, but I have no idea when such a thing will be perfected and accepted. Probably not anytime soon.

Gupta traces the history of pig domestication and breeding from thousands of years ago on rural Asian and European farms to the gestation crates in mechanized industrial American factories, noting that the animal may have been originally tamed for one simple reason: “They made excellent garbage disposal units,” usefully hoovering up slop that would have gone foul.

The opening:

Passing fields of soy, corn and towering bleach-white windmills fanning out across windy plains, I arrive early one morning somewhere between Chicago and Indianapolis at a place that promises “sow much fun.” 

The Pig Adventure, housing 3,000 sows and producing 80,000 piglets per year, sits alongside a 36,000-cow Dairy Adventure. This is “agro-Disneyland,” a place where rides have been replaced by adorable pink piglets and 72-cow robotic milking parlours.

I line up next to a retired couple and an extended family with three freckled kids from Chicago, and our tour starts inside a sleek lobby outfitted with touch-screens and billboards illuminating the intelligence of pigs – as smart as three-year-olds, better at learning tricks than dogs, outranked in brainpower only by chimps, dolphins and elephants. We pass through a mock shower where animated bubbles slide down the walls to clean us, and into a wide, carpeted corridor. Everything smells as pleasantly antiseptic as a dentist’s office. Arriving at a viewing area, we ogle some real pigs through thick, soundproof panes of glass.

Here, visitors can see for themselves how, even in today’s global, supermarket era, ‘Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations’ – or factory farms, as they’re better known – can continue to operate on gargantuan scales while still paying heed to animal welfare. Places like The Pig Adventure exist because this clash of practical and moral needs is becoming a massive consumer sticking point.•