http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2525/
March 22, 2006
Meat-Industrial Complex
How factory farms undercut public health
By Mark Winne
Drive through Don Oppliger’s Feed Yard in Clovis, New Mexico, and
you’ll see 35,000 head of beef cattle confined to pens that stretch
across the flat, barren landscape.
The constant shuffling of hooves raises a bacteria-laden dust cloud
that’s carried by the prevailing winds into west Texas, where it joins
the plumes of hundreds of other feedlots.
At one end of the complex sits a giant lagoon that catches the
operation’s chemicals, urine, antibiotics and other effluvia.
In the narrow strip of land that separates the fencing from the road
lie the carcasses of dead cows (a.k.a. "downers"), eyes bugged out,
tongues dangling and bellies bloated in the summer heat.
Moving from bovine to porcine, factory hog farms generate an odor so
intense it would knock a buzzard off a *****-wagon.
In cramped warehouse structures, as many as 20,000 hogs are confined
for their entire lives.
After five months, the mature hogs are sent off to the slaughterhouse
to have their throats slit and carcasses dipped in chemical vats to
loosen their skins.
According to Anita Poole, legal counsel for the Oklahoma-based Kerr
Center, which has fought that state’s takeover by the hog industry,
"The average Joe Blow who might stumble into a hog facility would
never want to eat pork again."
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What you don't know won't hurt you, eh?
Harry
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