Re:Pork's Dirty Secret (2006)
by Hopka on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @06:12AM
(#1163857)
It's also interesting what the company says in return: http://www.smithfieldfoods.com/RollingStone/
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A couple of for-show plants in US to cover the madness in now exported to Mexico and other countries with lax or unenforced pollution laws.
Remember the original swine flu? Not the 2009 H1N1 human outbreak, the ones before that killing vast numbers of pigs in industrial farms.
If the article is incorrect then Smithfield can and should sue Rolling Stone for libel. But they're not going to because it's true.
It's what they don't deny that still worries me. I was hoping that the family being consumed by the lagoon was a non truth. I read it as tragic comedy (shame on me)
It's weirdly like that scene out of the Jungle where the guy falls in the lard pit and becomes part of the product.
They contest 29 different assertions made by the rolling stones author. What didn't they deny?
What kind of position is that?! Someone accused you of wrongdoing and the only valid defense is suing the other? What happened to correcting each other? Accepting that misinterpretations and mistakes are human?
The want the whole thing to go away, even if you're in the right, a lot of times it isn't worth suing. Look at Barbra Streisand - some dude took pictures of her beach house, she was upset and sued him over it. So instead of the handful of people seeing the photos, the law suit hit all the news stations and tens of thousands of people saw the pictures.
Re:Pork's Dirty Secret (2006)
by danparsonson on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @06:56AM
(#1163897)
For further comparison, BBC article about the Polish farms operated by the same company here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4035081.stm.
Hmm. Why don't they let someone come film a random(typical) hog farm to document the conditions?
A few weeks ago, German newscasts aired some footage secretly recorded from a poultry farm that was a major supplier of one of the biggest (and well-known) meat processors in Germany.
The material really was disgusting: workers beating animals to death, throwing transportation boxes (thus, breaking the animals' bones) etc.
I'm not a hardliner-PETA-animal-rights-activist, but I think there is good reason to not naively believe those statements of companies like Smithfield.
You can find the video here, the show that ran it is called "Report Mainz" (Mainz is the name of a town).