Heidi Coon

Animal Rights Poetry and Prose By Heidi Coon from All-Creatures.org



A Pig's "Unlife"

I had woken a few times throughout the night, the whirring of the omnipresent fan above me drown out the cries from down the long corridor. Probably someone having a bad dream, because it was still dark and the only movement was from the others. I turn to try to get comfortable, no easy feat when you’re laying on cold, hard cement that’s slick with shit, piss, and vomit.

I’ve been here for almost 6 months. Truth be told, in that short time, I’ve think I’ve seen it all. Since I’ve been inside, I have seen piles of dead babies left there rotting, breeders with enormous tumors the size of soccer balls on their shoulders, a cell mate with open, gaping sores, and so much more.

Across from me, to my furthest right are rows of breeders kept pregnant to make babies. I breathe out sharply, the acrid air is filled with ammonia, permeating from giant floor vats filled with mine, and the others shit and piss. I heard that those pits are drained only once a year. I overheard a seasoned breeder telling a new breeder how she’d overheard a two-legger say ‘imagine pumping all of your raw sewage into your cellar for 365 days, and draining it once a year.’

….We couldn’t even imagine what a cellar was….

The new breeder was shocked. “How does this not kill us all?”

The senior breeder simply raised her eyes toward the rows of giant fans on the low ceiling above us. “Those, see those right there? “ She lowered her eyes, “they suck the stink out.”

“And,” another older breeder chimed in, “our food is laced daily with low level antibiotics. That’s how we can live in this….” she looked around solemnly before she finished her sentence, “hellhole.”

I watched through the bars of my cell, listening to their exchanges. I’ve learned a lot from them in the last 6 months. They know a lot that goes on that I can’t see from my cell. Unlike the breeders, I wasn’t confined in a too tight girdle of bars. No, my body wasn’t squashed in iron, my skin and fat wasn’t pushing out between bars.

In my short time here, I can tell you, in fact Promise you that it feels like an eternity. The breeders have been here for years, and from what I’ve been told, they spend two months each year forcibly laying on their side, unable to move.

I’d watched baby after baby after baby born, heard their mothers cry, unable to nuzzle them. One baby fell off the side and couldn’t make it back up top. The mother frantically calling, helpless and trapped. I head the baby’s cries, I’d even seen several two-leggers walk right past them in their white rubber boots. None of them seemed to notice, though I don’t understand how they didn’t. Each time they got closer, the mother would escalate her cries, the whites of her eyes visible as she looked in the direction of her fallen baby.

The two-leggers just kept about their business. And, let me tell you — that mother was brave for drawing ANY attention to herself and her baby. When I heard them coming, I shut my mouth and did my best to disappear. It’s a known FACT around this place that if you make any kind of scene, you will be dealt with. Hell, I admit when I was younger I was much more vocal. Then one day, I learned to keep quiet when I saw what happens when you piss off a two-legger.

A few cells down, when I was around 3 months old, there was this young guy, he was loud. Making a big stink, always bitching. He made these high pitch sounds while he’d bang against his cell door, it clanged and rattled for most of the day. At the time, a cell mate of mine told me the guy had lost his marbles. Going insane in this place was pretty common. I found out I didn’t have a tail for that reason. I don’t have a real memory of the day they took my tail, but I’ve seen what they do to the new babies tails. Fucking horrible, I’ll tell you. They just pick them up and snip them off.

Babies cry out, they bleed. This is so when we finally do crack, we don’t chew off our cell mates' tail.

Well, the guy that lost his marbles in his cell was banging his door, that is, until this specific two-legger came. When his white rubber boots came stomping down the aisle, I shut up, and all the breeders got real quiet too. This one, in specific, was known to be a real mean motherfucker. So, I settled down real quick and backed myself into the furthest corner and didn’t move a muscle.

The young, no marbles guy just kept on throwing himself into his cell door. BANG, CLANK!

That two-legger walked over to his cell, yelled something about giving him something to cry about then he pulled a big heavy pipe off a short ledge and repeatedly bashed the no marble guy's body. I could hear his screaming. I could hear these slapping thudding sounds, fuck, they were awful. The whole time the two-legger kept beating him, he was yelling at him. At least, now you know why I keep a low profile.

A little more about me, because as I’ve mentioned, I have mere days left here before I get to go through those doors. I started out with 5 other cell mates, now there is only 5 of us total. This guy that was with us coughed a lot, he had some kind of infection, at least that'swhat a breeder told me at the time. He got worse and worse and, then one night, he just stopped moving. I’d seen others stop moving before, especially the babies. As I speak now, I can see a couple dead babies across from me, if I crane my neck. One is past decomposed, horrible to have to look at, so I can’t imagine how the breeder feels with her dead baby laying in front of her. Now that I think about it, the breeder that said my cell mate who had an infection is also gone. I saw the two-leggers drag her off, that same day, when she stopped moving. They let the coughing guy stay where he laid for weeks. I tried not to look at him, but sometimes I found myself staring at him. My stomach always in knots.

When I realized I wasn’t a breeder, I admit, I felt lucky. I asked a breeder, her age showing, covered with crusted shit and scars, ‘what I was’, she told me I had 6 months before they took me.

“Where will they take me?” I asked, feeling a shard of what closely resembled what I imagined hope to feel like.

“Out those doors”, she answered with heavy lidded, sunken eyes.

“What is out those doors?” I asked, as I look toward them hopefully.

She sighed, closed her reddened eyes, and said nothing more.

I had to know.

I had such a short time left.

I turned to ask one of my cell mates. He just stared at me, half of his face swollen with an abscess that had been growing since we’d been there. He mumbled something about ‘slaughter weight’ before he turned his back to me.

I’ll let you know how things turn out for me, in a couple days……

You’re probably reading this and wondering how the hell I documented this, how did I get my message to the outside? Well, let’s just say there’s a few two-leggers out there fighting against what is happening to us. There are some decent two-leggers, you know.

97% of pigs are raised this way in the USA.

There are no laws.

This is all perfectly legal.

In fact, it’s state of the art.

This is the way pigs are raised for food.

Be Vegan

Stop eating bacon, pork chops, sausage, ham, Hot Dogs…..

Stop eating pigs.

Be Vegan

Big Ag is king.

A VERY powerful force.

It doesn’t matter whether politicians are Democrat, Republican or Libertarian……..they ALL dance to the tune of Big Agriculture.

STOP using your dollars to slate animals to a hellish unlife, & a gruesome fate.

Be Vegan

©Heidi Coon, 2022

Pig's face

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