Compassion’s award-winning Investigations Unit specialises in documenting the tragedies of industrial farming.

Set up in 1996, the unit often works covertly to get the real story and crucially the key evidence to help us show decision makers just why farm animals deserve better. Our investigators will often undertake harrowing assignments, with results that are hard to watch and even harder to document. Yet it is essential this emotionally draining work is carried out to bring us all closer to the realities of factory farming and help us push for the solutions required to enable farm animals to be free of confinement. Recently, I met with a member of the Investigations Unit.

Q: You must have witnessed some disturbing cases of animal suffering?

A: Yes, many. In this investigation I can recall in Italy hundreds of pigs being kept in one vast shed – destined to be hung off supermarket counters as prestigious hams. I could barely hear my colleague such was the noise. It was nearly feeding time. I’d never seen pigs so deprived of stimulation, that the only thing to occupy their inquisitive nature is to play with their own waste. Using their snouts to push it through the metal bars of their pens and then back in again really hit me hard. But what else could they do – there was nothing but concrete and slats in this shed – if not for this they would be taking out their frustrations on each other and in some pens this was clearly the case, with scratches and bite marks scarring the backs, ears and tails of the fattening pigs.

Interview with an Investigator