Rolling Stone Tackles Hog Farms

I’m not a frequent Rolling Stone reader so I can’t say whether this type of article is unusual for them. Nevertheless, Boss Hog, by Jeff Tietz, tackles the economic, cruelty, and environmental aspects of intensive hog farming, as well as the lack of conscience evidenced by the chair of Smithfield foods (the largest, most profitable pork processor) who cannot possibly believe in karma or Hell.

For those of you who are thinking of retiring to, or otherwise moving to the North Carolina (particularly its eastern area) you might want to rethink that. We have two words to describe people who move from the Northeast to Florida, then decide it’s too hot, expensive, and risky, so they move half way back home: "halfbacks" and "rebounders." We might want to add "death-wishers" to the list.

Tietz provides some useful statistics and comparisons. Animal People are used to reading about huge numbers with regard to "units" kept in each barrack of an intensive operation, or amounts of hog waste produced. But check these out:

• Smithfield’s total waste discharge is 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums.
• Smithfield killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s equivalent to slaughtering the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and 28 other large US cities.
• "Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria."
• Regarding workers pumping "shit" out of lagoons (holding tanks for hog waste) and spraying it onto surrounding fields: "This can turn hundreds of acres–thousands of football fields–into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit."

(Geez, I’ve never written the word "shit" so many times.)

• You can fly over eastern North Carolina for an hour and all you would see is corporate hog operations. Virtually every person in eastern NC lives near a lagoon.
• In 1995, the dike of a 120,000 square foot lagoon ruptured. It was the biggest spill in US history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

My favorite passage, regarding the prodigious use of antibiotics, is:

Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

Bon appetit.