A Drone Flew Over A Pig Farm To Discover It’s Not Really A Farm. It’s Something Much More Disturbing.
Bacon's a thing these days. Yummy and bad for you — mmmm. But here's what a drone saw when it payed a visit to some pig "farms" run by the world's biggest pork producer.
Drones get all kinds of places that can be hard to check out.
The owner of this drone, filmmaker Mark Devries, had an idea of what he'd discover here, but still ... whew.
He wanted to get a look at some pig farms operated by Murphy-Brown, a subdivision of Smithfield Farms, far and away the world's largest pork producer. There are over 2,000 farms like this in North Carolina alone.
As the drone comes over the trees, it comes across a lake.
But that's no lake at all.
It's an open sewage lagoon filled with pig feces and urine.
And it's the size of four football fields.
Beyond the lake are buildings in which thousands of pigs live, often packed in so tightly they can't even turn around. For months at a time.
It's unbelievable treatment of a creature believed to be both highly intelligent and self-aware.
Here's an unforgettable post we shared a while back that shows what happens to animals raised as food.
This is no farm. It's a factory built for efficiency.
When the pigs poop and pee, it falls through slats in the floor and gets flushed out into the "lake."
And it gets worse.
The operators of the factory farm have to clean out the cesspool when it gets too full. How do they do it?
They spray pig waste over the fields around the farm — and over neighbors' homes.
"It can, I think very correctly, be called 'environmental racism' or 'environmental injustice' that low-income people, people of color, bear the brunt of these practices."
— Steve Wing, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology, University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health
There are studies showing increased levels of asthma in kids nearby, as well as upper respiratory problems and elevated blood pressure in adults.
Here's the video Devries and his drone made.
It's unbelievable, really.
Did you know about all this? Not me.
When the filmmaker calls this "among the most bizarre and disturbing environmental phenomena that have ever confronted America," he's not exaggerating.
Step 1 in stopping these practices is bringing them into the light — and remember, there are thousands of factory farms like this.
Please share this with your friends if you agree that this isn't the kind of secret that should be kept.