The founding director of animal protection organisation Farm Transparency Project (FTP), Chris Delforce, has been raided by Victoria Police at his Melbourne home this morning, in relation to footage of animal cruelty captured earlier this year at twenty piggeries in the state's north. 

Delforce's electronic devices including phones and laptops have been seized. 

The footage, captured by a large number of anonymous activists and provided to FTP, revealed widespread suffering, neglect, and potential breaches of animal welfare legislation, including: 

• Pigs living in extreme confinement in their own waste, including in "sow stalls" claimed by the industry to have been phased out 8 years ago
• Piglets surgically mutilated 
• Fighting and cannibalism in barren "group housing" pens
• Pigs with infected wounds and contagious diseases
• Numerous sick, dying and dead pigs
• Piglets crushed by their mothers (sows) in the confinement of farrowing crates
• Pigs being eaten alive by rats
• Piles of dead piglets dumped outside
• Filthy, unsanitary conditions with high populations of rats, cockroaches, and other insects

It is understood that despite complaints made by FTP to authorities, no raids have occurred, and no criminal charges laid, against any of the facilities in response to the cruelty uncovered. 

Delforce: "This heavy-handed targeting of animal advocates is an indictment of the Victorian government's priorities. Extreme and widespread animal cruelty is apparently of far less concern than the people who expose it - what chance do the animals have? Police should not be acting as the private mercenaries of the pig slaughter industry."

"We will continue to speak up for those most vulnerable, and those who have been deliberately silenced; we will not back down. If anything, this raid today emphasises just how terrified this industry is of continued exposure. Their walls of secrecy are crumbling further every day."