Swine Flu: Pandemic or Revenge? April 28, 2009

People who eat meat continue to pay for animals to live their entire lives in their own excrement, in tiny urine soaked cages or in crates so small they can't turn around, lay down comfortably, or do anything that is natural to them. These same people are shocked when animalborne diseases—like swine flu, start to infect and kill humans across the globe.

Well, we're not shocked. Anyone who knows how animals are treated only to be slaughtered and eaten, knows it's only a matter of time until the horrible conditions we raise animals in comes back to, well, kill us.

A headline in Vera Cruz's La Marcha points the blame for swine flu at gi-normous pig-breeding farms in Mexico, that are operated by a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, the world's largest hog producer—remember them? Local residents reportedly believe that feces from the pig farms has contaminated the water and the air, spreading the virus to people. Another article in the Huffington Post quotes La Jornada newspaper, which points the finger at a factory farm in La Gloria, Mexico, saying, "Clouds of flies emanate from the lagoons where Granjas Carroll discharges the fecal waste from its hog barns ... " Yup, we knew all that.

Pigs and other animals on factory farms are fed a steady diet of drugs to keep them alive in unsanitary, stressful conditions, increasing the chance that drug-resistant superbugs will develop. Hans-Gerhard Wagner, a senior officer with the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, has called the intensive industrial farming of livestock (aka factory farming) an "opportunity for emerging disease."

The root of the problem is how filthy and cruel factory farming is. Please write to your members of Congress now. Urge them to call for an end to factory farming in the U.S. in order to prevent future outbreaks of animalborne diseases.

Stay loud!
-Rachel

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