A common misconception about pigs. Pigs are rather clean animals, they do appreciate mud baths for thermal regulation and for cleaning off parasites, but they don’t typically roll around in shit, unless humans force them into small cages where they have no other option but to lie down where they shit.
IMHO referring to police as pigs is mostly an insult to a family of cute, clean and rather intelligent animals.
And indeed police will tolerate farmers violating regulation and even some abuse, because both police and farmers are on the same side, conservative to alt-right.
Just imagine a protest against climate change where the police is sprayed with manure, that will inevitably result in a large number of hospitalizations. That’s why I find farmers abusing their privileges not so funny. YMMV.
Until I see that exact regulation - if it exists at all in that form - I won’t comment on whether or not that is dumb.
You do hold farmers in very high esteem. Over here, to get rid of manure, farmers regularly bring out manure to barren fields, and outside of the growth period - even though that is explicitly forbidden because when there are no plants growing the nitrate goes straight into the groundwater.
So it appears that there are instances where farmers do need to be told when to do things, because they sometimes don’t seem to give a shit what the consequences of their actions are.
And I have doubts that the “best yield possible” is necessarily a healthy and sustainable goal in the first place
That being said, the goal of the farmers who are protesting appears to be more like “get the most subsidies possible”.
