In November 2025, the owner of Hogwood Farm in Oxhill, Warwickshire, UK, decided to begin winding down one of England’s most infamous pig exploitation sites, which is now expected to shut its piggery for good by September 2026. The controversial unit, long criticised by animal protection campaigners and featured in the award-winning documentary Hogwood, is earmarked for redevelopment into housing once the last pigs are sent to be killed.
The farm, bought by its current proprietor in 1996, first came under intense scrutiny in 2017 when the animal rights organisation Viva! carried out an undercover investigation. Over the following two years, Viva! reported scenes of pigs forced to live among the bodies of other pigs, overcrowded farrowing sheds, sick animals abandoned in passageways, and routine tail docking of piglets. Hidden cameras later filmed workers hitting pigs with poles and sticks, evidence that helped push Tesco to end its supply relationship with the farm and led to the loss of its Red Tractor stamp.
The owner has now reduced the breeding herd to about 300 sows, with all adult pigs sent to slaughter after their piglets were weaned. Those remaining piglets are due to be raised for the flesh market over the coming months, with the entire piggery expected to cease operations by early autumn 2026. The wider holding, covering about 73.6 hectares of land, will continue as a farm, but the section that housed the pig unit is subject to fresh plans to build 10 homes on the site, following two previously rejected attempts by the local council. Viva!’s founder, Juliet Gellatley, welcomed the news that pig exploitation at Hogwood Farm is set to end. She said, “In 2017, I knelt beside a dying sow on the filthy floor of one of Hogwood’s sheds and made her a promise — that we would not stop fighting for the pigs trapped in that horrific place. This news comes far too late for her and for the countless animals who suffered some of the worst welfare violations I’ve seen in three decades of investigations. But it means that no more pigs will suffer at Hogwood from September, and that matters enormously.”
