Mercy For Animals by Nathan Runkle & Gene Stone

Author:Nathan Runkle & Gene Stone [Runkle, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2017-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Cesspools of Waste

Mark Devries is a thirty-year-old attorney and filmmaker who helps produce MFA’s investigative videos. Before that, Mark produced the documentary Speciesism, which explores the dark side of factory farming. Along the way, Mark discovered how to use drones for filming. He flew a drone over a hog farm in North Carolina and gained a vantage point rarely seen. He learned how the animals’ feces falls through slats in the concrete floor and is flushed into giant open-air cesspools the size of multiple football fields. As a result, people living nearby are forced to smell what is similar to millions of gallons of untreated human sewage.

More disturbing, when the lagoons overflowed, workers would hook up hoses and pump the liquid waste into giant misting machines. Instead of paying to transport millions of gallons of waste elsewhere, these factory farms drained their cesspools by simply spraying the waste into the air, allowing the wind to carry the noxious mist to nearby communities.

Mark interviewed scores of neighbors affected by these cesspools. They mentioned not being able to catch their breath due to the sewage smell, and many other health issues. Numerous studies back up what Mark and his drones discovered. One North Carolina analysis of more than fifty-eight thousand children found a 23 percent higher prevalence of asthma symptoms among students attending schools near these factory farms. Other studies have linked the waste to neurological and respiratory problems and increases in dangerous bacteria in drinking water, such as E. coli, salmonella, and cryptosporidium.

The toxic mist from open-air lagoons carries into neighboring yards, sickening residents. Elsie Herring, a senior citizen who lives near the lagoon, told National Geographic that the odor was “very, very offensive. I don’t feel comfortable even having people over, because it’s embarrassing and humiliating that, you know, you’re trying to entertain someone and there’s someone eight feet away spraying animal waste on you.” She described physical symptoms including headaches, stomachaches, excessive coughing, watery eyes, and the urge to vomit.

There isn’t much these residents can do. People who live near factory farms are often very low-income and cannot afford to move. Considering that pig farming earns North Carolina almost $3 billion per year, these red lagoons are creating green pockets for a select few. Like the plight of animals inside factory farms, it’s easy to overlook the plight of humans living beside them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.