Among all the various dodgy aspects of factory-style meat production, the use of tight cages to confine pregnant female pigs surely ranks among the most awful. The hog industry isn't keen on displaying this practice to the public, but in 2010, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) planted a camera-toting undercover investigator in a hog facility run by Smithfield Foods, the globe's largest hog producer and pork processor. You can read the report here, but you can't beat the video for sheer visceral effect:

Now check out this column by Rick Berman, a notorious PR hired gun whose past clients include Big Tobacco, in the industry trade journal Pork Network. If the piece is any indication of the pork industry's commitment to banning sow crates, then the practice seems pretty entrenched for the long haul. Berman is a battle-scarred veteran of pork-industry battles. During its nasty and ultimately failed fight to stave off unionization at its vast Tar Heel pork-processing facility, Smithfield hired Berman to roll out TV commercials trashing union leaders, Bloomberg reported last year. And Berman's Center for Consumer Freedom even runs a website dedicated to "Keeping a watchful eye on the Humane Society of the US."

But the column gets interesting when Berman quite correctly points out that when giant players like Smithfield and Hormel promise to phase out crates, the pledge only applies to the hog operations that they directly run. But they raise only a fraction of the hogs they slaughter and process. The rest come from independent producers. According to Berman, pledges from companies like Smithfield and Hormel, even if they are kept, apply to only 20 percent of the hogs raised in the US. "The vast majority of the remaining 80% of the U.S. swine industry, very few of which are large or publicly traded, has no plans to stop using standard sow housing," Berman writes. Now, something like two-thirds of US hog production comes from producers working under contract with mega-processors like Smithfield and Cargill, and presumably, these companies could push for a transition away from crates among their contract suppliers. But Berman's right—they haven't done that.

He flatly states that "consumers don’t care about the gestation stall issue" without citing any public-opinion data.
That's really the only cogent bit in Berman's piece. The rest is assertion unbacked by evidence—mainly, an effort to reassure producers that they can and should continue using tight cages for sows. For example, he flatly states that "consumers don’t care about the gestation stall issue" without citing any public-opinion data. The Humane Society, however, points to two separate nationwide polls—one from the agribusiness-tied American Farm Bureau—finding that a majority of people do favor banning gestation stalls.