SEPTEMBER 21, 2018
Sue Coe, “Drowned Before Slaughtered” (2018).
News of the potentially catastrophic flooding of pigs’ feces lagoons calls two things to mind. The first is a Facebook post I saw last July: “People will give up straws to save fish, but they won’t stop eating fish to save fish.” In other words, the individual fish don’t matter, only “fish” do, just as ecofeminist Marti Kheel observed of environmentalists killing wolves to save “the wolf.” The second is a childhood memory. At age eight in Dunn, North Carolina, I stood beside an injured pig, fallen or escaped from a slaughterhouse-bound truck. We gathered on the asphalt by her body, the adults exchanging words about what was to be done as the odors of gasoline and oil mingled with the scent of charred flesh wafting from “Dobb’s Garage and Grill.” My mother eventually led me away by the hand, explaining that Dobb’s and the other adults’ talk about saving the pig meant only that she would be preserved to be killed and eaten. She took me back to the road several times to keep the injured pig company. The pig was barely moving but her eyes were wide open. I wonder if she was retrieved for slaughter or if she died on the roadside. Perhaps she was still living when the highway sanitation workers removed her.
I am reminded of both the fish saved to be fished and the Dunn pig as hurricane Florence causes devastating flooding in the Carolinas and images of pigs in the aftermath of hurricanes Floyd, in 1999, and Matthew, in 2016, circulate in the news. In some photographs and videos, pigs are stranded on the rooftops of inundated intensive confinement facilities. In others, they are drowning or already dead, floating carcasses caught up in a current of liquid partially composed of their own excrement. Like the injured pig on the roadside, what would it mean to save those who remain?
There is widespread fear that North Carolina’s pig feces “lagoons” will overflow, spreading farm-related pollutants and toxins into the drinking water. Thus far, twenty-one have already spilled over. References to feces and lagoons are incessant. People are talking about excrement but they are not talking about the pigs. North Carolina has 9.7 million pigs, the second highest number in the United States. They are warehoused in what are known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), in sheds with slatted floors so that their waste – ten billion tons annually of urine, feces and dead piglets – can be efficiently collected below and, later, flushed into open-air lagoons. Even without a mega-storm, the lagoons are a major contributor to global warming, releasing methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; indeed, animal agriculture overall is the second largest contributor to human-made greenhouse gas emissions. Proximity to pig CAFOs is associated with pulmonary and respiratory diseases, disproportionately affecting people of color and low-income communities. If the lagoons continue to overflow, the environmental and health consequences will be dire. It will also mean that 9.7 million sentient, intelligent and sociable creatures will slowly drown. As of today, 5,500 pigs have already perished, in addition to 3.4 million warehoused chickens and turkeys.
