The Massacre Needs Attention
There are times when innocent animals must be killed for disease control purposes. The month of December was a massacre in the name of quarantine operations. Countless civil servants, people from animal protection authorities, and farm owners say they are still suffering from hallucinations of pigs squealing and mother pigs struggling to protect their piglets as they were being buried alive.
For nearly a month countless pigs have been dumped alive into vinyl-covered pits in remote hills and fields after it was discovered that pigs are to blame for FMD, also known as Foot-and-Mouth disease. According to the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries 농림수산식품부, so far approximately 1.5 million pigs and cows have been slaughtered. What is upsetting many people is that the authorities are burying the animals alive, violating domestic and international laws on animal slaughter.
According to domestic and international laws on the killing of animals for disease control, they must be killed before burial. Authorities say the regulation is dangerous, as the disease spreads instantly and there isn’t the time to accomplish death and burial separately. They have added that euthanasia is not an option since large doses are required and there is no time to give an injections to each animal. Therefore, they claim they had no other option than to slaughter hundreds of animals each day.
Is the statement simply an excuse made by the government? The law states quarantine workers must kill animals in a proper way by using poisonous gas and drugs before burying them. Animal groups are refuting the statement. They say the excavators push two to three pigs into the pits at a time. Since the pigs tend to try to escape, the slowly-moving excavators need to repeat the pushing three or four times. Logically the drug option would take less time than the pushing operation.
Interestingly, the government has been pushing the live burial of animals since 2000, when FMD first broke out in Korea. Surprisingly, the government has no problem ignoring the guidelines. It is undeniably true that the government is not coming up with any punitive measures against the breach of laws forbidding live burials. International animal rights groups are denouncing the nation’s culling method and demanding the Korean government works in strict accordance with international animal welfare guidelines.
Although the live burials are banned by the law, there is no exact punishment set to deter those violating the law. With government authorities continuing to bury animals alive, it is only a matter of time before the illegal and inhumane cruelty will contaminate the environment. Unfortunately, countless animals that do not yet have the disease are killed along with the diseased because they are in the vicinity of infected animals. Is such preventive slaughter effective? Is there no solution to put the break on such massacres? Can’t they be vaccinated? It seems the government doesn’t have the will to care for the little fellows since they will end up on the dinner table at one point or another anyway.
http://edu.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/01/25/2011012501665.html
