Video: Local Pig Farmer Transforms Into Vegan Activist

For Immediate Release:
April 10, 2020

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

For many years, Justin Reineke worked on a pig farm near Steinbach, Manitoba, where he killed countless piglets using the standard industry practice of “thumping”—killing sickly piglets by smashing them to the ground—but as he reveals in this new PETA documentary short, the routine violence prompted him to quit his job, go vegan, and adopt an American mini pig named Bubba.

Reineke was only 17 years old when he started working in the meat industry. Soon, he was exposed to other industry norms like taking piglets away from their mothers, clipping their teeth, chopping off their tails, and removing their testicles, all with no pain relief for the animals. He knew he couldn’t continue causing pain and death to animals for food. He is now vegan and is haunted by the violence that he witnessed and participated in.

Says Reineke in the video, “I feel like other workers in the industry aren’t speaking up because of social pressures of family and friends, and I think when I speak up, it helps make it easier for them to share their stories.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—hopes that Reineke’s story will encourage people to examine the idea of speciesism, which is the human-supremacist worldview that other animals are nothing more than commodities to breed, mutilate, and kill at will.

More details are available on PETA’s blog.