Grace, Emily & Charlotte

We recently had the opportunity to welcome some baby pigs to Eden. Destined to be sent to slaughter, or worse, used for breeding, Grace, Emily & Charlotte were given the opportunity to experience the relative freedom of life at a vegan sanctuary.

Born into unsanitary conditions and weaned too young, baby pigs suffer a range of emotional, social and physical deprivation and suffering.

Grace couldn’t eat or drink and had to be bottle fed to treat her illnesses.

What is it like to bottle feed a baby of another species? It may not equate with feeding one’s own child, but it is no different to caring for a child in one’s custody. A baby pig is as precious, as vulnerable, as defenceless as a child of any other species. When well, they are as fun loving as any human child. When ill you wish with every fibre of your being they they didn’t suffer.

They don’t have to. In a vegan world they would experience no unnecessary suffering.

Deprived so young of their mothers, baby pigs try to suckle each other and anyone they have contact with. How they must long for the warm sustenance, the attuned singing and nursing, the love of their mothers. Mothers who conceived them by the violation of artificial insemination; mothers who are confined and unable to move for part of their pregnancies; mothers who feel the same maternal love that we feel for our children and who are at least as capable of mothering as we are, but who cannot interact with them save through the bars of their farrowing crates. Mothers who will soon lose their precious babies as they are readied for slaughter.

This is the story of three of those babies. You can watch it here.