A sorry day to be a pig

In an effort to keep the Canadian pig industry from collapsing, the federal government has announced that they'll be paying pig farmers $50 million of taxpayers' money to kill off 150,000 pigs over the next six months and to give the bulk of the meat to pet food processors or otherwise dispose of it, but earmarking 'up to 25% of it for food banks. How, do you wonder, will these pigs who are mostly being trashed be killed?

From the Canadian Press:

To ensure that the animals are treated in a humane way, producers are being encouraged to ship their pigs to approved slaughter plants. Producers who live in areas without plants will be asked to ship their animals to a province with such a facility.

But there is nothing to prevent producers from killing the animals on their farms themselves.

"We want to minimize the amount of on-farm euthanizing," Rice said. "Before we would approve that application we would need to know how it was going to be done - that it was going to be done humanely and in an environmentally sound way."