To date, four million animals have been buried alive in South Korea because humans are too lazy and too cheap to properly vaccinate them. Four million.
South Korea is faced with explosions of foot-and-mouth disease in pigs and cows and avian flu in chickens, and the government's solution is to bury the diseased animals alive. South Korea had several opportunities to inoculate their pigs against foot-and-mouth disease and prevent it from spreading; they chose to do nothing. Now they're stuck with major disease outbreaks, and despite having the resources to vaccinate or euthanize the diseased animals, they again choose not to use them because of the relatively minimal cost. Animal Rights Korea is documenting the atrocities, although there are no large animal welfare organizations in South Korea to pressure the government to stop. The country is a member of the World Organization for Animal Health, whose guidelines explicitly forbidding the burial of live animals the South Korean government has chosen to ignore.
Even sicker, many rural South Koreans are turning on their taps to find that the water runs red with blood. The animals' blood is seeping out of their graves and contaminating the drinking water.
This is End of Days shit, people. It's what happens when profit is the bottom line, when nobody is held accountable. I'm positive that if factory farms in the United States could get away with stuff like this that they absolutely would, because people want their cheap meat more than they want to pay for the vaccinations to keep the animals alive long enough to slaughter and eat them. I hope everyone ordering a $5 Meat Lover's pizza tonight knows that they are responsible for this.
What can we do? We can tell everyone we know that this is happening and that it can't be ignored. We can contact South Korea's American Embassy, and the South Korean Minister of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and demand that this stop immediately. Then we can get creative and thoughtful and passionate about our activism. What can you do today to make the world a better, less scary place for those we share it with? I think one of the obvious choices is to stop eating animals but maybe, for you, it's to reduce your consumption -- every single one of these four million animals is a sentient being, and no sentient being deserves to be buried alive. I mean, four million. Can you even wrap your head around that number? If you can then you're a math genius because holy crap. I have a hard time thinking about my one dog being in physical pain... to think about four million smart, sensitive, unique creatures being thrown into live graves on top of each other? I can't.
We have to change. As Erik Marcus of Vegan.com says:
What we are witnessing in South Korea is unconscionable animal cruelty occurring on a massive scale, and no reliable way to prevent repeat this scenario from playing out again in the future. It's a situation the entire world is ethically obligated to confront.
Scary stuff.
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We already have more than enough farmland to feed humans the world over.
This, of course, is the country that banned US meat (and even today, it's still difficult to find it) over bullsh!t reasons.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/20/hundreds-of-dead-birds-in_n_811709.html
This (it's 2011, for god's sake) is appalling, of course, one of many things that make me wish I weren't also a human being.