There was an announcement not too long ago about how there was going to be pig farming included in the new Farming Simulator 17. Along with that announcement was a letter sent to Christian Ammann, the managing director of GIANTS software urging the creators of the popular agricultural sim to include footage of pigs being slaughtered. However, violence in video games has been around for years with the likes of Manhunt, Postal 2 or even that scene from Call of Duty where you mowed down hundreds of innocents in an airport terrorist attack. I don’t think watching virtual pigs get slaughtered is going to someone off their next visit to Burger King.
“Farming Simulator 17 should either show the nightmarish reality endured by pigs at the abattoir or change into Vegan Farming Simulator 17 and let players grow crops – to do anything else would be dishonest”, says PETA European Outreach Liaison Harriet Barclay. “PETA urges anyone who considers pig-slaughter footage too gruesome to include in a simulator game to rid their real-life plates of animal corpses and switch to cruelty-free vegan foods.”
PETA who’s mottoe partly reads “Animals Are Not Ours To Eat” dosuments the lives that animals go through on factory farms. When focusing on pigs, the documentaries show mother pigs as literal baby factories, where they are forced to give birth time and time again. The naimals are lived in crates so small that they can’t do a full 360-degree turn. The piglets are removed from their mother’s care after only a few weeks old and their teeth are ground down and tails cut off with no painkillers. When arrived at the abattoir, the pigs are hung upside down to be killed and drained of blood. Workers are even known to work in a hurry, meaning the pigs aren’t stunned before being dunked into boiling water.
So what do you think? Would watching virtual pigs suffer the horrors of an abattoir in a video game be enough to put you off meat? If you would like to read up on any of the information written above, you can do so by visiting the PETA.org website now.
