Finish the killing and exploitation of pigs, with imprisonment and fines for those who do not comply

Thousands of pigs are sacrificed with their backs to European regulations

From November to February, thousands of fattening pigs are slaughtered in Spain in the family killings. A knife, as was always done, with the animal screaming and shaking until it bleeds completely. This procedure has been prohibited by law for almost two decades, but some people do not know it or look the other way. A 1993 European directive allows this tradition to continue, outside the slaughterhouses, but only if the pig has been stunned before the knife is stuck. That is practically never done. Nowhere.

In the same sense it was regulated in Spain in 1995, and some regions even drafted their own regulations on animal welfare that gave them nice headlines and applause, but that they have never fulfilled.

"It's a private act that we can not control," they say in Catalonia.

Extremadura delegated legal control to the Town Councils

The Balearic Islands, to give a first example, promised in its day to distribute stun guns in the Town Halls in order to make it easier for neighbors to comply with the law. It was in 2007. The headline came out in the press, but little is known about the stunners.

In Extremadura there was talk of something similar and a rule delegated to the town councils and veterinarians who perform the sanitary registers of the viscera, monitoring compliance with the law. That, in 2006, also had tasty headlines in the media. They have not received a single complaint, they say, despite the thousands of pigs that are killed in the traditional way. It is difficult - and perhaps brazen - to ask a mayor of a town of 400 inhabitants, or 1,000, to denounce his neighbors, or to self-denounce, that mayors also kill people at home.

There are more ways to circumvent the law. The Catalan case could be described as follows: house killings are neither prohibited nor authorized. "It is a private act that we can not control, that is under the responsibility of each one, Our advice is to kill in slaughter, with daze, but if they do not, we can not stop it," says a spokeswoman for the Health Department Catalan. Not even, he informs, there are sanitary records of these killings, because "they are done with private veterinarians". If they are done, because there is no official control over that, they say.

In Castilla y León, no complaints have been received either in Andalusia. But the pig is not left unconscious before killing it. And the same in Galicia or Castilla-La Mancha. The grunts of death are heard in any dawn of San Martin. Last winter 17,481 pigs were slaughtered in family slaughter in Extremadura; in Andalusia, there were 4,294 home-made massacres in 2009, but the campaign continues in 2010 (they do not have closed data). 30,797 pigs were slaughtered at home in Castilla y León between 2009 and 2010.

Add and follow. Although it continues more than sum, because these semifest traditions diminish noticeably from year to year. When Spain ratified European regulations in 1995, the Castilian nationals sacrificed 126,755 pigs for their own consumption, a figure that in a decade fell to 52,202. In Extremadura, 48,149 pigs were killed at the beginning of this century, more than twice as much as at present. The decline has to do with the depopulation of the rural world, and with the ways of life, which have changed so much. The slaughter products were eaten in the field, at harvest time. It is not so usual anymore, nor so necessary.

With the knife and with a hurtful scream - even before being slashed - the immense majority of the 2,000 pigs sacrificed in the Balearic Islands die to produce sobrasadas in the rural slaughters. Between November and April, in all the villages, the Mediterranean peasant festival is maintained, which survives with roots. Tens of thousands of people attend the celebration and hundreds of thousands consume sausages made in these circumstances, reports Andreu Manresa. The regulating council of the sobrasada de Mallorca claims to act under full control and legality. It registered in 2009 the death of 1,776 black pigs, the native variant. This last week the College of Veterinarians had counted some 600 pigs from private slaughters, on which sanitary analyzes are carried out, but the way in which they are killed is not controlled. Only in the Mallorcan municipality of Santanyí has ​​a slaughterhouse been set up for private individuals to come and slaughter their pigs for slaughter and then make their sausages in their homes.

The Balearic Islands and some other community already had in their day an upset with the law. In 2001, the National Association for the Protection and Welfare of Animals (Anpba) denounced in Europe the practice of domestic slaughter without stunning the pig. Baleares resisted at first, but finally the regulations were changed.

Alfonso Chillerón, president of Anpba, assures that they have received complaints and asked about it to the Ministry of the Environment. Of the answer that they obtain "it will depend that we elevate or not the subject before the European Commission", they say. "In the same way that the health of the meat is officially controlled in these slaughters, the mandatory pre-stunning of the pigs should also be controlled," they say.

SIGN AND SHARE THIS PETITION