Smithfield fires three in probe of abuse on pig farm

Smithfield Foods Inc. said Tuesday that it has fired three people - two workers and a supervisor - at a farm in Waverly where an animal-rights group last week accused the company of abusing pigs.
 
State Veterinarian Richard Wilkes, who visited the farm last week, also issued a statement saying he found "no indications of animal abuse or neglect."
 
Wilkes said the farm, run by Smithfield subsidiary Murphy-Brown LLC, had "appropriate animal care and handling guidelines, as well as appropriate employee training in place."
 
The Humane Society of the United States last week released a video, taken by an employee who it said had worked undercover at the farm for a month, showing pregnant sows cramped in "gestation stalls," or crates.
 
Several sows had cuts and sores. One had blood dripping from its mouth and onto the bars and floor of the stall after repeatedly biting the bars.
 
In the video, workers threw baby pigs into a cart and a sow, which had been shot in the head, in a trash bin, though it was still breathing.
 
In response, Smithfield began an internal investigation and launched a website, smithfieldfoodstoday.com. The website Tuesday reported that two workers were fired Thursday and a supervisor was dismissed Friday for violations of the company's animal-welfare policies.
 
"Further details will be released when the final report is issued," Smithfield spokeswoman Keira Lombardo said in an e-mail.
 
"Firing a few workers seems like an odd response to a systemic problem," Josh Balk, a spokesman for the Humane Society, wrote in an e-mail. "Smithfield confines hundreds of thousands of pigs in crates so small they can't even turn around."
 
Balk again criticized Smithfield for not reinstating a timeline for eliminating the crates. "Any action it takes other than committing back to its self-imposed, very lenient timeline on eliminating gestation crates is a mere distraction," he wrote.
 
In 2007, Smithfield announced that it would phase out the gestation stalls by 2017 and replace them with roomier "group housing" for pregnant sows.
 
Last year, it delayed the program, citing the economy. In September, C. Larry Pope, the company's president and CEO, said the stalls would be replaced as farms were upgraded, but he declined to offer a deadline for removing all of them.
 
Another Smithfield spokeswoman, Amy Richards, said that was because "we've learned things can happen with the economy." She said she did not know how many stalls already had been removed.
 
In response to the Humane Society video, Smithfield said it would hire animal-welfare researcher Temple Grandin as a consultant and would invite Wilkes, the state veterinarian, to visit the Waverly farm.