Hog Farming: Filth and Flu

8. Juni 2009 | Von atsil2 | Kategorie:English TOWe

Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer and processor works on devastation either. A New York Times-report in May 2009 threw light on the global spreading of inhuman treatment of animals by this company and its assistants on a “higher level”:

“Almost unnoticed by the rest of the Continent, Smithfield Foods, the agribusiness giant has moved into Eastern Europe with the force of a factory engine, assembling networks of farms, breeding pigs on the fast track, and slaughtering them for every bit of meat and muscle that can be squeezed into a sausage.”¹

Along with environmental destruction by factory farming – remember the fish-dying of the 1970s and 1980s in North Carolina ?! - comes the threat of pandemics like the avian and the swine flu.

“Smithfield has a joint venture in a Mexican hog farm located near where United Nations scientists are investigating a potential link between pigs and the new strain of influenza in humans. With the exact origins of the virus still in doubt, Smithfield emphasizes that the disease has struck none of its hogs or employees.”²

In his “Boss Hog”-report (published in the “Rolling Stone”-Magazine 2006) Jeff Tietz has figured out that

Smithfield Foods killed and processed about 27 million hogs the year before. Considering the slaughter-weight of a hog – which is fifty percent heavier than that of a person – the butchering and boxing of this amount of pigs is roughly equivalent to the same procedure to the entire human population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson. And because hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do, the estimated amount of 26 million tons of pig shit p.a. would fill four Yankee Stadiums! According to Tietz these excrements are highly toxic in a way that they are rather close to radioactive waste than to organic manure³

“It’s disgusting!” said Robert F. Kennedy jr. of the Waterkeeper Alliance what is happening now in Eastern Europe, where “in less than five years, Smithfield enlisted politicians in Poland and Romania⁴ tapped into hefty European Union farm subsidies and fended off local opposition groups to create a conglomerate of feed mills, slaughterhouses and climate-controlled barns housing thousands of hogs.”

Smithfield Foods – Dangers of Industrial Agriculture? (Kennedy jr. in Poland)

And what’s about the connection to the Swine Flu?

“Residents [of Perote] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.”⁵

Local, national and global NGOs are working on this “topic” – for decades already:

PETA -
AVAAZ – Farm Sanctuary – The Humane Farming Association – The Humane Society of the United States

Support them and get involved in animal and human protection!

Videos:

Warning! Some graphics of our video compilation might be shocking, offensive, horrid, disgusting and make your heart bleed and your stomach turn!