How does this stop the spread? Is it in the killing of the babies? How does the feeding of them to adults help? I would think you’d want to take anything diseased out of the equation instead of forcing ingestion of it.
I should be disgusted but my disgust is overwhelmed by my fascination that such a thing would work and that anyone would think of trying it.
The gestation crates are far more disgusting than the “piglet smoothies.” Pigs will happily eat their own kind if they happen to die, in the wild or in open pens, and I can’t summon additional outrage over making food out of animals that were being raised for food anyway. There’s nothing “cruel” about that specific thing.
I’d like to see more concrete discussion of potential health hazards, mad-cow-style. That should’ve been the #1 point, not an afterthought to projecting human morals onto animals. And, of course, the animals’ living conditions continue to be genuinely disgusting, cruel, and inhumane; but we’ve all got outrage fatigue over that, so activists need a novel angle (“piglet smoothies”) if they want to get people talking (or get featured on BoingBoing).
Ah recycling at it’s finest.
At Iron Maiden farm, should we really be surprised? ♪♫ ***"We oil the jaws of the (pork) machine and feed it with our babies…***"♪♫
“Iron Maiden” hog farm? Really? Why not something more menacing, like Hot Poker in the Eye Pastures, or Bamboo Sliver Under the Fingernails Farms?
Well, videos like that are why industrial farms are trying to make it illegal for their operations to be filmed.
Well, that kind of thing was proven to work great in the UK.
That is, until it didn’t. But, you know … who could possibly have forseen something bad happening from that process.
I won’t use U.S. pork products in my cured meats. You can tell at first glance looking at a U.S. pork belly that the animals are not well and not healthy. Japanese and Canadian bellies look so much healthier, and taste 100x better.
Ozzy Osbourne a-bat-toir?
Alice Chicken Cooper?
I wonder if feeding people blended baby people would help guard against viral outbreaks or antibiotic-resistant bacterium like MRSA.
Dead Leopard?
Came here to say this and that many of these things don’t happen in civilised countries where the bodies who regulate food production and animal treatment aren’t funded according to the number of companies they regulate, which encourages them to err on the side of $.
But like Phasma said: if this is somehow good for the pigs then what do you care… they’re heading to the slaughterhouse either way. Any animal that we kill or use for food deserves to be treated well until the moment we kill them as we owe them at least that. Also, if you’ve ordered meat in your meal then fucking finish it. I know this doesn’t make a difference to the animal since they’re already dead, but show a little respect to the thing that died for you to eat.
Other axe to grind: religious exceptions to animal slaughter laws because some dumb fuckers think that their sky wizard wants them to kill stuff to eat in particular (and often much more inhumane) ways. I’m looking at you, jews and muslims. This is the thing that annoys me most about religion: special exceptions to the law because of some idiotic simplistic fantasy story about the world’s origins.
Pork Soda
Look for it next to Liquid Chicken
My brother did an internship in a pig farm as part of his bio/agriculture degree. Modern meat production (and byproducts like milk, eggs…) is the collision of the industrial process applied to animal management. Yup, it can be pretty ugly.
Your point would be more poignant if it weren’t for the fact that Jews and Muslims aren’t allowed to eat pork. At all. Piglet slurry is purely on all of us heathens.
(The things we do for bacon)
Presumably it’s to provide antibodies, and to ensure that the yet-uninfected animals’ first brush with the disease is against a sample that’s already been weakened by the immune systems of the other animals?
I Am Not A Biologist, though, and could be quite off the mark…
Your point would be more sensible if you had any idea what you were talking about. Did I say jews and muslims eat pork? Be better informed.
PS: You clearly don’t know many jews… that shit is meat candy for them because it’s the forbidden fruit.
