while Korea Animal Rights Advocates repeats a list, in English, of cases of culling during foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in 2010. Here is an update from last week.
Meanwhile, the Korea Times reports on a curious phenomenon with, it says, potentially deadly consequences:
Residents of a village hit by food-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, have seen their faucets start to deliver water mixed with blood since the beginning of the New Year.
This eerie situation, first reported last Saturday, came just one day after some of nearly 1,000 pigs within a 500-meter radius of an FMD-hit livestock farm were buried alive in the village’s vicinity to prevent further spread of the deadly animal disease.
Quarantine officers claim the situation is temporary and things will soon return to normal, while many experts are skeptical, insisting that blood from the buried animals will gradually soak into the ground to eventually contaminate underground water reservoirs, a major source of drinking water for the villagers.
The authorities said the slaughtered animals were buried in a 4-5 meter-deep hole covered by two-fold vinyl to keep anything from their bodies from leaking out.
But it’s uncertain whether the vinyl would remain intact if they had been buried alive.
“It’s possible that the vinyl could be torn by animals struggling to survive,” a quarantine officer said.
It concludes with a paragraph on the decision to cull rather than vaccinate:
The government started vaccinating animals susceptible to FMD last week. But the use of vaccines is still limited for fear that wider use could put local beef dealers at a disadvantage in exporting their products.
7 comments:
Hmmm...back to bottled water for me!
They are burying pigs ALIVE? Are they completely INSANE? Korea has a long way to go to becoming a civilized country.
Who are these so called 'experts' (if there actually were any considering it was the KT) claiming there is blood in tap water and the this blood came from pigs. There are so many things wrong with their thinking I would put their IQ below that of netizens.
1. Even if a red(ish) material did come out of the taps (most likely someone making something up anyway) have there been any test to prove it was blood?
2. Animals buried alive release little blood and decomposition would be quite slow (if at all) given the current freezing weather.
3. It would take a long time for blood to reach the water table and even so, such a small amount of blood (at most 4000L) wouldn't be too noticeable in the vast amount of water in an underground aquifer.
4. Water goes through many purification processes before it reaches the pipelines and goes to your house. There would be very little trace of blood after passing through the purification process.
That being said burying animals alive is not a very humane way to deal with the problem, and surely there's plenty of bullets lying around (hell, the army could use some target practice ^^).
But I blame both the stupid ajossi farmer who didn't declare himself at quarantine when returning from rural Vietnam (we can all guess what he was doing there), and mostly the government for refusing to mass vaccinate animals due the the fact the Korea will lose it's FMD free status.
Surely average farmers would rather see their animals vaccinated and be able to sell their meat locally at reduced prices, then buried alive.
First of all, blood out of the faucet is one of the signs of the apocalypse, isn't it?
Second of all, when I was a young guy I lived in a tiny town in Texas. Sometimes the water would run red or brown when we turned on the tap. But this was due to rust or dirt getting into the pipes, not the blood of the innocent animals we slaughtered and/or buried alive while still squealing their plaintive and yet hopeless squeals...
"Massive cull planned as foot-and-mouth disease spreads"
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/01/116_79256.html
The article says:
The government said Thursday that up to one million animals have been culled so far and one million more could be destroyed in several days as the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) spreads rapidly throughout the country.
We've been reporting on this for forever and it still boggles me. FMD is not that fatal in adult animals, though according to the reporters, it's more cost-effective to just bury and kill them all than treat them. Not to mention, it's quite a painful disease for the animals... But I would think that a shot to the head would at least be more humane than suffocating them.
Though, I can't help but wonder if there are any long-term effects on the environment from these mass graves of infected animals.
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