An “activity suspension procedure” was launched this week against a pig farm in Landes, after the broadcast of images of mistreatment, the prefecture said on Friday, confirming information from Release.
A video broadcast Friday by the animal protection association Futur Asso and the newspaper Releasefilmed inside Novoporc, a breeding sow farm, shows employees pushing wheelbarrows filled with dead piglets as well as sows stuck in the manure pit.
Several inspections carried out since September
In these images, two employees report unpaid wages and denounce the unsanitary conditions of the site, a lack of equipment and labor, as well as the obligation to kill the most puny piglets by hand.
Based in Mant, in the south of the department, the operator will be heard on Tuesday by State services and “in the absence of an immediate and effective action plan” will have its activity suspended “in whole or in part to preserve the health of certain animals,” explained the prefecture. “Recipients” of these images at the end of August, the services of the Departmental Directorate of Employment, Labor, Solidarity and Population Protection (DDETSPP) had carried out several inspections from the month of September and noted “malfunctions”, indicated the prefecture.
A thousand sows raised on the site
Two formal notices were sent in September and October, without the operator implementing the “requested corrections”, added the prefecture which, after a final inspection at the end of November, initiated on Tuesday “a procedure to suspend activities “. The manager of Novoporc could not immediately be reached.
The Futur Asso association, which estimates the number of sows raised on the site at around a thousand, has called for its immediate closure.