In the United States, the damage caused by the coronavirus continues to accumulate. As a result of containment and social distancing, more than 20 slaughterhouses have been forced to close across the country. Consequently, the farmers choose to "depopulate" their farms, an understatement designating the mass slaughter of their animals.
More than two million animals have already been slaughtered and that number is expected to increase, reports the Guardian . Controversial, the approved method of slaughter is suffocation by obstruction of the respiratory tract or stopping the ventilation of farms.
" Food waste "
In Iowa, the state’s largest pork producer in the country, authorities are already warning farmers that they will have to kill up to 700,000 animals a week due to the closings of meat processing establishments. Due to lack of labor, 2 million chickens have been killed on several Delaware farms owned by Delmarva Poultry Industry.
"With a reduced staff, many factories are not able to process chickens at the rate that was expected before the implementation of containment measures and social distancing," said the company press release. The spokesman for the company still announced to the Washington Post that it was only a loss of 0.3% of the total production of Delmarva. "So any effect on the availability of chicken is very, very limited," he says.
The president of Tyler Foods, one of the largest meat processing establishments in the country, is sounding the alarm after the closure of several of its factories across the country. Covid-19 has been detected in one of them.
“In addition to the shortages of meat, this is a serious problem of food waste. Farmers across the country will simply have nowhere to sell their livestock when they could have fed the country. Millions of animals - chickens, pigs and cattle - will be depopulated [Editor's note: slaughtered] due to the closure of our meat processing plants. The food supply chain is breaking, ”said John Tyson in a blog post.
Slaughter methods criticized
An animal defense association, Mercy for Animals, has severely criticized the slaughter methods intended for these animals, deemed "inhuman". The first method is to cover the chickens with a layer of foam that will block their airways, gradually suffocating them in several minutes when the second method requires simply cutting off the ventilation.
"The shutdown of ventilation systems means that animals die from organ failure due to overheating of their body, because temperatures rise quickly under these conditions" denounces in a letter to meat producers the association Mercy for Animals.
President Donald Trump issued a decree last Tuesday to keep slaughterhouses and meat processing plants open, which could help solve the problems in the meat industry.
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