Lynn – Local animal rights activists, along with national nonprofit Mercy For Animals, will hold a demonstration outside Walmart on Lynnway with a giant inflatable pig to call attention to Walmart’s pork suppliers practice of confining pregnant sows to small gestation crates for most of their lives.

In July, an undercover investigation by Mercy For Animals exposed shocking animal abuse at a major Walmart pork supplier, however, Walmart has refused to follow the lead of retailers like Costco, Kroger, and Safeway, all of whom have agreed that gestation crates are inherently cruel.

MFA’s national campaign coordinator Phil Letten will be in town to organize this event. You are welcome to contact him directly at 810-599-1278.

For more about this investigation, and the ongoing campaign against Walmart, please see www.WalmartCruelty.com.  

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10-FT-TALL BLOODY, CAGED “PIG” JOINS ANIMAL RIGHTS PROTEST OUTSIDE BOSTON WALMART

Mercy For Animals Says Walmart Pork Suppliers Abuse Animals; Calls on Retail Giant to Phase Out Cruel Crates for Pigs

BOSTON – Members of the national animal rights organization Mercy For Animals, joined by a 10-foot tall inflatable pig, bloody with sores and locked in a narrow crate, will greet shoppers outside Walmart with a demonstration against the cruel practice of confining pregnant pigs in tiny crates on factory farms where they are unable to even lie down comfortably, turn around, or engage in basic natural behaviors.

Date: Tuesday, September 25

Time: 11 a.m. – 12 noon

Location: Outside Walmart at 780 Lynnway, Lynn, MA

Local activists wielding signs with images of abused pigs, reading: “Walmart Tortures Pigs” and “Walmart Pork = Animal Abuse” will join the protest. Walmart is under fire for cruelty to animals following an undercover investigation exposing shocking abuse to pigs at one of the retailer’s main pork suppliers.

Mercy For Animals is calling on Walmart to require its pork suppliers to phase out the practice of confining pigs in narrow crates—something Kroger, Safeway, Costco, and McDonald’s have recently done. The practice of confining sensitive, intelligent, and social pigs into tiny gestation crates has been widely condemned by veterinarians and leading farmed animal welfare experts. Confining a pregnant pig inside a narrow gestation crate, where she is virtually immobilized, has been banned in nine U.S. states and the entire European Union.

Newly released hidden-camera footage secretly recorded at Christensen Farms, a Walmart pork supplier, reveals pregnant pigs confined for nearly their entire lives in fly-infested crates barely larger than their own bodies, pigs suffering from bloody open wounds and infections, and piglets being slammed headfirst into the ground and having their testicles ripped out and tails cut off without painkillers.

“Walmart pork suppliers are guilty of horrific cruelty to animals,” says Mercy For Animals’ national campaign coordinator Phil Letten. “Pork sold in Walmart stores comes from pigs who are abused, neglected, and sentenced to lives of extreme confinement and deprivation in crates. This is blatant animal abuse that no socially responsible corporation should be supporting. If Walmart pork producers subjected dogs and cats to the array of standard abuses they inflict on pigs, they would be arrested and jailed on grounds of animal cruelty.”

To learn more visit WalmartCruelty.com