A Pig’s Tail – An Animated Short About Industrial Pig Farming

A Pig’s Tail is a short, 5-minute, animated children’s film about a pig Ginger and her mom that exposes the problems with industrial pig farming today and educates about more humane ways of farming. The film focuses on breeding sows that are confined day and night during their four-month pregnancy in gestation crates, cages that are basically the same size as the sow’s body, preventing them from moving or turning around. The pigs are then placed into another crate to give birth, re-impregnated, and put back into a gestation crate. This happens pregnancy after pregnancy for their entire lives, adding up to years of immobilization, which causes them psychological stress, torment, distress, physical pain and suffering.

The film contrasts the traditional ways pigs were raised outside on farms with the freedom to move, forage, dig, root, lie in the dirt and enjoy the outdoors versus today’s industrial farming practices of tail-docking and ripping their teeth out without any antibiotics to prevent them from biting, forcing them to live in severe confinement on concrete floors, in over-crowded, unnatural, stressful, dark, smelly warehouses, away from daylight and sunlight.

This film is for everyone and for all ages. If you’re an educator with young children or students, after watching the film, see the lesson plan to help students explore and explain the issues. The Lesson Plan is provided by the Humane Society of the U.S.

Learn more about A Pig’s Tail.

Film Credits