>Under this method, pigs at the company’s rural Grundy County facility are being “depopulated,” using the industry’s jargon, by sealing off all airways to their barns and inserting steam into them, intensifying the heat and humidity inside and leaving them to die overnight. Most pigs — though not all — die after hours of suffering from a combination of being suffocated and roasted to death. The recordings obtained by The Intercept include audio of the piercing cries of pigs as they succumb. The recordings also show that some pigs manage to survive the ordeal — but, on the morning after, Iowa Select dispatches armed workers to enter the barn to survey the mound of pig corpses for any lingering signs of life, and then use their bolt guns to extinguish any survivors.
Truly disturbing. Increasing cruelty and suffering in order to minimize monetary loss of profits.
I don't think there's a way to tastefully draw a parallel between thousands of pigs being suffocated out of convenience and unarmed civilians being murdered by the police...
But all I can think of right now is "I can't breathe"
They are afraid of losing their audience and/or advertisers. Not that hard to figure out.
Same reason why I tune out Facebook posts like this -- I have a visceral reaction to pictures of destroyed animals when I see pictures/videos. I would argue it's the news consumers that have a problem with it, not investigative journalists.
Also, there are laws in many of the states which specialize in factory livestock that criminalize gathering evidence, so it's difficult to report.
I don't think people react the same to murders even of different classes of people, let alone all animals. I don't make up the rules; I only observe them.
Humans have heuristics. I suspect the more we can personally identify with a victim, the more we are likely to be interested in hearing about it. Why don't news programs continue to post about all of the Pakistanis, Afghanis, Somalis, Libyans, etc that are killed either by terrorists or US drone strikes? There's only so much people will tolerate before their attention moves elsewhere.
I trust that news outlets will follow the money. If it was low risk of being sued, not terribly expensive to cover (as in didn't piss off advertisers), and got viewers to pay attention (without vomiting during dinner time), news programs would cover it.
This shows how broken the farming model is in the States. Slaughter is pretty much the same, people have to work too quickly to despatch, often resulting in animals surviving as they go on the line to be cut up.
It would have been far more humane to use carbon dioxide instead, this is standard in Europe. It induces unconsciousness without much trouble.
Truly disturbing. Increasing cruelty and suffering in order to minimize monetary loss of profits.