Kill the Pigs, Save the Seals

Jimmy Buffet is best known for a bunch of songs that I would probably recognize if I heard them, but off-hand, all I know is that the name sounds familiar.

Since getting famous from his music, Buffet has opened two restaurant chains called Cheeseburger in Paradise and Margaritaville after two of his apparently better-known songs (if you’d like to point me to an mp3, feel free).

Buffet is apparently an ocean conservationist who has made “great strides in making people aware of the plight of the manatee”, although presumably he is less fond of the ocean creatures that he serves in his restaurant. Canadian aquatic organisms are breathing a sigh of relief, however, because Buffet has decided to boycott Canadian seafood.

“Margaritaville Cafes will not be purchasing or serving Canadian seafood products until the Canadian government ends the commercial seal hunt permanently”, says Buffet.

Meanwhile, up the coast in North Carolina, massive hog raising operations run by Smithfield Foods are killing millions of pigs and producing vast rivers of toxic and destructive pig shit. From the story in Rolling Stone:

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do — even if it came marginally close to that standard — it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield’s business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

These pits are a wicked mixture of “bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs”, a malignant concoction that turns pink. You can see it in these Google Maps: one and two.

So toxic is this mixture that if you fall in, you’re literally dead and so is anyone who might jump in to try and save you. So pervasive is the odor of dead pigs and shit that you can smell it from thousands of feet in the air while flying. It’s even dangerous:

Sometimes the stink literally knocks people down: They walk out of the house to get something in the yard and become so nauseous they collapse. When they retain consciousness, they crawl back into the house.

That has happened several times to Julian and Charlotte Savage, an elderly couple whose farmland now abuts a Smithfield sprayfield — one of several meant to absorb the shit of 50,000 hogs. The Savages live in a small, modular kit house. Sitting in the kitchen, Charlotte tells me that she once saw Julian collapse in the yard and ran out and threw a coat over his head and dragged him back inside.

Buffet says that his seafood boycott is not “one nation telling another how to best manage its affairs”, rather, it’s “an effort to make humans more humane in the way they manage the planet”.

Kudos to you, Mr. Buffet, for your concern and your responsibility. I’m looking forward to more boycott announcements from you, starting with pork from Smithfield Foods.

[tags]conservation, nature, environment, pigs, seals[/tags]