Millions of Animal Lives Wasted due to Brexit and Covid

One meat exporter from the UK said last month that he had 30 tonnes of pork rotting in Rotterdam, held up by paperwork. All thanks to Brexit. And he's not the only one. Another exporter said he had five containers held up with 23 tonnes of meat in each container (115 tonnes in total). But all they're really concerned about is their bottom line... their profits.

It all sounds so clinical... pork, meat, produce, goods... although the word "rotting" should wake us up to the fact that this isn't just a waste of food. It's a waste of lives.

Your average 300 lb hog will generally produce 130 lbs of usable pork. So let's do some math:

• 1 tonne = 2204 lbs

• 30 tonnes = 68,138 lbs
  
• 115 tonnes = 253,532 lbs

• 30 tonnes or 68,138 lbs divided by 120 lbs of meat/pig = 525 pigs
• 115 tonnes = 253,532 lbs divided by 120 lbs of meat/pig = 1950 pigs
  

Soooo... just two British meat exporters have raised and killed roughly 2500 pigs for nothing. What a hideous, horrible waste of lives. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. There are many, many more meat exporters (chickens, pigs, lamb) as well as seafood exporters who have had to dump thousands of tonnes of meat/seafood because of paperwork issues with the new Brexit export/import regulations.

One official from the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) said that more than 120 lorries carrying British meat were stuck at Rotterdam. Let's say 23 tonnes/lorry (according to one news article) =  2760 tonnes. More than 50,000 animal lives wasted. And some of those lorries might have pork... but some might have lamb or even chicken. Which would mean many, many more lives/tonne since chickens weigh a lot less than pigs...

Perhaps it's time to rethink the whole meat industry thing... after all, a shipment of dried lentils or beans can sit for days or weeks and be no worse for it. Just saying. Eating meat is a luxury...

Covid

And I don't even want to think about the 17,000,000 (million!) mink that were "culled"... exterminated? slaughtered? Let's just say killed... in Denmark because of Covid. Not all of those mink were sick with a Covid variant, they decided to exterminate/eliminate/execute their entire mink farm populations just to be on the safe side. That's an unfathomable number of animals.

How do you even kill that many animals within the space of a few days? Gassing them with carbon dioxide apparently... but it can be problematic because mink are semi-aquatic animals and can hold their breath for long periods which means that after 30 seconds of gassing... they might not all be dead.

Why the heck does Denmark even have so many mink? Because they are the world's largest producer of mink pelts, producing over 19,000,000 pelts every year (over a billion dollars). Who buys that many mink pelts?? China. It's a luxury item, see. Wearing a mink fur coat denotes status and wealth. I tend to lean more towards the idea that it denotes cruelty, inhumanity and sheer horror. But hey, that's just me.

Of course, European fur farms are better regulated than fur farms in China, which should perhaps make us feel a bit better. At least in Denmark, the animals are killed by gassing before being stripped of their skins. In China, they simply stun the animals with blows to the head (or grab them by the hide legs and whack their heads on the ground), hang them upside down and then skin them starting at the hind legs. They then pull the pelt down the body and off the head. And yes, the animals are still alive during this process and some wake up while being skinned. Some still have beating hearts and eye movements five to ten minutes after being skinned alive. All that suffering so some rich person, or wanna-be-rich person, can have the luxury status-symbol of a fur coat.

Every once in a while, when I think about having a steak or some garlic prawns... I just have to remind myself of how that steak was raised... and of how the prawns are harvested... and I don't really want steak or prawns anymore.