Millions Of Pigs Will Be Euthanized As Pandemic Cripples Meatpacking Plants
Jason Lusk, the head of the agricultural economics department at Purdue University, estimates that there is currently a 40 percent reduction in meat processing capacity, which will lead to 200,000 pigs per day being left on their farms.
"That's a million extra pigs that would have gone to market, but instead are staying on the farm, from just one week," Lusk said.I guess from an individual pig's point of view, it matters little whether they are being killed to be eaten, or be buried in a pit, all at the young age of 6 months. (Apparently, left alone, they will live 15 to 20 years.)
Hogs ready for slaughter cannot be easily held on farms because of their fast rate of growth. Pigs that are held much longer than six months after birth grow too large for processing, and meat processing plants typically won't accept hogs larger than 300 pounds.
"Nationwide, as an industry, we're thinking right now, given what we know, somewhere between five and ten million" hogs for euthanization, said Leman, a farmer from Eureka, Ill., and a board member of the Illinois Pork Producers Association.
Before the Coronavirus crisis, pork production was a finely-tuned, just-in-time supply chain. During normal times, this led to efficiency and the reduction of the cost to produce pork. Now, it is a significant burden to hog farmers who will have nowhere to sell their ready-for-market pigs.
But from a broader point of view, where a humane person's preference is that, by and large, it's good to let semi-sentient creatures live out their life if they are doing me (or other semi-sentient creatures) no substantial harm, this completely ruins the justification for having helped create more of them in the first place. (The justification being that we are all part of a natural order in which living creatures find good sustenance from eating other living creatures, and hence we are entitled to humanely raise and kill some, and not be wasteful about it either.)
I eat meat, but I do feel worse about farming and slaughter as I get older.
1 comment:
"I eat meat, but I do feel worse about farming and slaughter as I get older."
I'm the same way. I think small high-rise towns should be surrounded by small permaculture farms. And an animal should be killed in the field without the slaughterhouse and taken to a local butcher. I feel pretty strongly about this. Taking all those animals to a killing factory. Really its quite unacceptable. Even if it takes 50 years to phase to a better way, we ought to be making the effort.
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