At least rearing pigs for food has some concrete end in mind in term of producing meat for sustenance. Per the slide-show below is tattooing pigs (assumedly a painful process) to use as as live art tattoo billboards an ethical thing to do or is it tantamount to animal abuse?
Given the number of Disney characters on those pigs, I’m guessing that it’s definitely copyright abuse.
I doubt the pigs feel much of anything, to be honest. Tattoos over fatty areas are less painful, and coupled with the very thick skin of a pig, I can’t imagine it being too sensitive.
I don’t agree with tattooing live pigs for purposes other than identification, but pig skin has traditionally been used by tattoo artists for training purposes, IIRC.
I don’t think you could keep a live pig on a table like in the picture without some kind of anaestesia and/or sedation
No, you couldn’t, even if your weren’t trying to do anything to it. Pigs are notoriously uncooperative creatures, even when they’re calm.
Besides, you’d probably have to have a hydraulic lift table or a winch to get an adult pig up there, and the process would freak it out so it would be kicking and struggling and shrieking (and judging by the stories of vets I’ve worked with, most likely trying its damnedest to bite everybody and spraying shit everywhere.)
There’s some kind of happy drugs involved here, I’d guess one (or a cocktail) of the injectable anesthetics large animal vets use for things like castrations. These things get 'em asleep enough to work on for an hour or so, but not deep enough that they can’t guard their airway, which explains why the pig in the slideshow isn’t intubated.
Yes, there are some very nice drug cocktails that would anesthetize a pig for about an hour. There is NO WAY an awake pig would lie quietly with its eyes closed and allow someone to tatoo it.’
Pigs are incredibly difficult to intubate, so most pig surgery is done via a mask, not a tube.
In my parts there was a fad for a while to dye white cats purple and pink using hair dyes. It was decided after some deliberation that it was abuse and the people who dyed their cats were fined.