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Is ham on the nose?

It's a scene guaranteed to turn you off Christmas crackling: a pig lying on a concrete floor with a large sore on its body crawling with maggots. The image came from ABC TV's report on conditions in a Tasmanian piggery that aired in May this year.Like the recent 60 Minutes program on the factory farming of pigs, it was uneasy viewing, but it might mean better news for pigs - eventually. After all, it took a few dismal images of caged chickens to coax more consumers away from cage eggs to free range. Will graphic pictures in dingy sheds do the same for pigs?

In the run up to Christmas legs of ham are going for $8.95 a kilo at my local supermarket - about the same as budget beef mince. At this price you can bet they're from animals that spent their lives in sheds - unlike the cute piglet in green grass on the cover of Australian Pork Limited's Annual report. Yet Andrew Spencer, the CEO of Australian Pork, maintains free range living isn't the ideal life for pigs that we consumers imagine it is. "People think that pigs are happier outside, but they are not necessarily better off because they can be stressed by heat and cold," he told me last week. But I got a different view from Lee McCosker of the Free Range Pork Farmers' Association ."Why would natural conditions stress any animal?" says McCosker, a NSW pig farmer whose own free range pork products carry the Humane Choice Label "The real problem is that selective breeding in the intensive pig farming industry has produced animals that don't cope well outside in the open."

March 6, 2009

A LACK of national standards means some pork and chicken producers deceive consumers with bogus free-range claims, says LEE McCOSKER

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Free Range Labelling in the Spotlight