A Mercy For Animals undercover investigation reveals unconscionable cruelty to mother pigs and their young piglets at a Hatfield Quality Meat supplier - "Country View Family Farms," in Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania. The hidden camera video provides consumers with a jarring glimpse into the nightmarish world of factory pork production.

MFA's investigation uncovered:

• Workers grabbing piglets by their fragile ears or legs and throwing them across the room and slamming them into transport carts.
• Workers tattooing sows by repeatedly driving sharp metal spikes into their flesh.
• Sows with untreated rectal prolapses and deep, infected sores and scrapes from constant rubbing against the bars of their stalls.
• Workers cutting off piglets' tails with dull pliers and castrating them by ripping out their testes with their bare hands - all without anesthesia.
• Thousands of pregnant pigs confined in two-feet wide metal stalls so small that they could only take one step forward or backward and could not turn around or lie down comfortably.
• Injured, sick and runt piglets being tossed into overcrowded gassing kill carts, slowly suffocating from CO2.
• Workers firing steel rods into sows' heads, sometimes as many as four separate times, before the sows fell and died.

Numerous veterinarians and animal welfare experts have harshly condemned the conditions documented at this "family farm" - which confines nearly 3,000 breeding sows. Dr. Nedim C. Buyukmihci, Emeritus Professor of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, asserts, "I can state unequivocally that the pigs in this facility suffered immensely...These people showed complete disregard for the welfare or well-being on the pigs."

The findings of MFA's newest investigation are consistent with those documented at pig farms across the country in recent years - illustrating that animal neglect and abuse are the pork industry norm, not the exception.

Not only are the abuses documented at this facility standard within the industry, they are legal in the state of Pennsylvania. Like most states, Pennsylvania's anti-cruelty statute exempts farmed animals from legal protection. Pigs, like all farmed animals, also lack federal protection during their lives confined on factory farms.

As consumers we can choose compassion over cruelty at every meal. Adopting a compassionate vegan diet is the most powerful action we can take to put an end to needless animal suffering and the conditions documented during this investigation.