Meat Industry Poses Major Threat to Humans, Animals, Ecosystem as Hurricane Florence Approaches

Pig Farm Fly Over

Meat Industry Poses Major Threat to Humans, Animals, Ecosystem as Hurricane Florence Approaches

Our thoughts are with North Carolina residents today as they brace for the storm, and especially with those who had to leave their homes in the coastal flood region to an uncertain fate.

Sadly, this region is also home to the largest concentration of the state’s estimated 9 million pigs, 830.8 million chickens raised for meat, and 32.5 million turkeys — most confined and caged without any hope of evacuation. These animals are far too often the forgotten victims of natural disasters since most reports on the agricultural damage focus almost exclusively on economic losses.

We at Farm Sanctuary saw this first-hand in the days after Hurricane Katrina when we arrived on the scene in rural Mississippi. There, we faced demolished warehouses confining tens of thousands of chickens, fields littered with dead birds alongside living ones struggling to survive, and mass graves. We were able to rescue 725 chickens during that effort, but millions more had already perished.

 

Pig factory farms have been expanding rapidly in North Carolina, and tremendous damage follows in their wake.

Rescuers work to pull desperate birds from a pit in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Rescuers work to pull desperate birds from a pit in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

These animals are far too often the forgotten victims of natural disasters.

As the residents of North Carolina know far too well, Florence is not the first hurricane to threaten havoc on the state’s floodplains. Hurricane Matthew killed thousands of factory farmed animals in 2016, and 1999’s Hurricane Floyd remains infamous for floods that contributed to deaths of 57 humans along with rivers teeming with corpses of bloated pigs and chickens and their manure. Learn more about the magnitude of this threat based on the state of factory farming in North Carolina by visiting FarmSanctuary.org/neighbors.

Justice for North Carolina
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Transcript

This industry has taken something from me that's very valuable. When I was a kid, the only thing I wanted to do was to be on the water. The fish were healthy. The water was clean. Then things began to change. The fish started dying. My son's body was filled with sores. Mine was covered with sores.


Is there a moment that you can look back on and say, "That was the moment when my eyes opened, and I saw the magnitude of this problem?"


I'm looking for pollution along the shores. And I said, "This is stupid. That's not where it's coming from." What was going on in the river where we lost a billion fish in just a couple of days, with open, bleeding, lesions all over their bodies? And millions and millions and hundreds of millions more since then?


That had a cause that was beyond the shores of the river. So I got in an airplane. I can take you up and I can show you. I flew up the Trent River into Jones County. And I'm looking down there, and there's these huge, pink-- well, they're now cesspools, but I didn't know what they were. And then these buildings that were there, but you couldn't see anything. It was just metal buildings. They didn't even look like barns.


So when I landed, I called a friend of mine in the Department of Environmental Management. And I said, "I just came out here. What is all this stuff?" He said, "That's all hog feces and urine." And I said, "Well, I saw some of it being sprayed on the ground. What's that?" He said, "That's how they get rid of it." And then as I remember his words, he says, "Rick, it's basically dumping."
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