Malia’s Story

This is a mother, being dragged inside a slaughterhouse to have her throat slit.

Look at her poor, humped body, marked in indelible pen by the farmer who decreed her no longer profitable. She has spent her life in Hell from the moment she was born, but she is still afraid of death, and drags her feet desperately as she tries to resist her fate.

Inside her heart is pounding and the blood is rushing to her head. In mere moments, that blood  will be spilled on a filthy slaughterhouse floor, and splashed upon the aprons of those paid to murder her.

She was selectively bred to produce as many piglets as possible, and she has given birth to dozens of babies.   She was first impregnated when she was only eight months old. 

She spent her entire life in cages, lined up with hundreds of other sows in an enormous, barren, foul smelling shed. Bars separated her from her sisters. She could never seek comfort or security from pressing against the flesh of her kind. She could not escape. She could not retreat. She could not turn around.

All day every day this naturally clean girl lay in her own excrement on the hard concrete floor.  Her muscles ached and drew tight, and she developed sores from rubbing against the steel bars. In the pain and intense stress that this confinement caused her, she bit the bars of the steel cage that surrounded her, and her mouth filled with white foam that spat from her mouth when she cried out her distress.

All day every day this naturally clean girl lay in her own excrement on the hard concrete floor.  Her muscles ached and drew tight, and she developed sores from rubbing against the steel bars. In the pain and intense stress that this confinement caused her, she bit the bars of the steel cage that surrounded her, and her mouth filled with white foam that spat from her mouth when she cried out her distress.

After enduring her pregnancy in this prison the size of a household fridge, she was moved to yet another cage – a birthing cage, or ‘farrowing crate’, in preparation for having her babies. Prompted by her natural instincts, she immediately looked around for something to build a nest with – but could find nothing.

She was so stressed and tense that the birth was all the more painful for her. When her piglets arrived, the steel bars prevented her from interacting with them. Her babies latched onto her teets as she lay motionless on her side, sinking ever deeper into despair. She longed to satisfy her natural yearning to care for her babies properly, but she never could, and a normal mother-piglet bond was never formed.

When her babies were just three weeks old, they were forcibly weaned and taken from her. She was then returned to another cage to be made pregnant again, and the painful cycle repeated a number of times until she was ‘spent’ and no longer any use to the farmer. She was then sent to the slaughterhouse.

Which is where you see her now.

This girl never had a name, just a number.

So I will call her Malia, which means ‘Beloved’

–    Sandra Kyle

Sandra Kyle is the owner of End Animal Slaughter, website, which she started in 2018

with the goal of closing all slaughterhouses in the Western World by 2025.