Enviro Warrior - Wake up and smell the Homus ... then tread lightly upon the planet.

"I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of faeces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs and I could neither see nor breathe … There must have been thirty thousand chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn’t move, didn’t cluck. They were almost like statues of chickens, living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way."

—Michael Specter, New Yorker, April 14, 2003.

“… Smithfield also estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. However, so exceptional is its faecal waste, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city government’s are required to -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money… So, many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems…”

" …The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit and probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. To produce 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year, in squalid unhealthy conditions, requires that the pigs be pumped up with compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin – because otherwise diseases would likely kill them. The pigs are also infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides.

“… Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat…”

“…The story degenerates at this point to reveal the awful conditions that the pigs live in – by the thousands in warehouses of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment-pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond…”

“…The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

The point is this, that the drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulphide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million faecal coliform bacteria.

The Smithfield's holding ponds, or lagoons cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is pink from an interaction of chemicals, afterbirths and still born piglets. Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into faeces ridden swampland.

To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the faecal slurry out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.

The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver died in Oklahoma when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death..”

"Chickens exist in stable social groups. They can recognize each other by their facial features. They have 24 distinct cries that communicate a wealth of information to one other, including separate alarm calls depending on whether a predator is travelling by land or sea. They are good at solving problems."