Pigs are gentle itelligent animals with complex personalities. However, when born to a life on a factory farm, they don’t get to exhibit their natural behaviors. Instead, they are subject to countless forms of mutilation, abuse, and neglect. Read on to learn what the millions of pigs raised and killed for food every year experience on factory farms. The process of breeding animals for food is highly exploitative. Female pigs—known as “sows”—are repeatedly impregnated through artificial insemination, giving birth to litters of up to 12 piglets at a time. Throughout their pregnancies and after giving birth, mother pigs are kept in "gestation crates." These crates are so small that the pigs can barely move or turn around. Studies show that mother pigs, like human mothers, care for their babies. They instinctively want to nurture and protect their piglets by attempting to build them a nest, but on factory farms, they lack the materials to do so. They become distressed when separated from their babies, which happens when piglets are taken away from their mothers at just 3 weeks old. (In nature, mother pigs nurse their babies for 10-to-17 weeks.) This cruel separation is standard in the pork industry, where these pigs are not seen as the mothers and babies that they are. Instead, they are seen as machines built for profit. Animals are often subjected to specific cruelties based on whether they are male or female, and pigs are no exception. Male piglets are castrated with a scalpel or knife shortly after being born, usually without any pain relief. This process is understandably traumatic for the piglets, who often will lie alone and trembling for days following the procedure. Although the cruelty of this castration is undeniable, meat giants like Smithfield Foods claim that castration is necessary to improve the smell and taste of their meat. All of this pain and suffering is inflicted on intelligent animals in order to make a product seem more appealing to consumers, many of whom don't realize these abuses are taking place. When kept in confined, crowded spaces on factory farms, pigs become stressed and may exhibit compulsive behaviors. One of the most harmful of these behaviors is biting their own tails. Instead of giving pigs more room to help relieve their stress, meat producers resort to cutting off each pig's tail without anesthetic in a process known as “tail-docking.” Can you imagine having a sensitive part of your body amputated without any pain relief? It's horrifying that factory farms enslave, torture, mutilate pigs and all their other animals before they murder them.