Canadian bacon

Time to slaughter swine

By Caroline Cummins

May 7, 2008

As NPR reported a few weeks ago, there are apparently
too many pigs in Canada. Farmers can’t sell their pigs and are going out of business. The proposed solution? Kill ‘em — the hogs, that is, not the farmers.

According to Clare Schlegel, president of the Canadian Pork Council, some of the slaughtered swine will be sold, but 25 percent of it will go to food banks and the rest will become pet food.

But what about all those people in the Third World who’ve been rioting lately over the scarcity and cost of food? Here’s what NPR had to say:

As for a noble goal of, for example, shipping the food to Haiti’s poor, Schlegel says that would be impractical, citing food-safety reasons, matters of cost, and potential problems from flooding a fragile market with free meat. “We don’t want to simply transfer our pain to farmers in other parts of the world.”

Or fill their bellies.