cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2879916
TL;DR for the title:
Employees [from this investigation] can be seen removing the intestines of dead, disease-infected piglets and mixing them with piglet feces in a blender — a mixture to be fed to the adult breeding pigs — causing one worker to gag.
The practice, called “feedback,” is common in the pork business (or “controlled oral exposure” in industry jargon).
The article itself goes into more depth about all the horrific things in the pork industry such as these
The pork industry has pushed pigs to their biological limits, leading to many bizarre practices beyond feedback, many of which are inhumane. To name one example recently in the news: There are horse farms that impregnate horses, extract their blood for a serum, abort their pregnancies, and then sell the serum to pig farms to induce puberty in young female pigs and produce larger litters. Holden Farms, like most pig breeding farms, confine pregnant pigs in gestation crates, cages so small they can’t turn around for practically their entire lives.
As a Brit who is old enough to remember the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy/mad cow disease) epidemic, this is astonishingly reckless and dangerous. This is how you get prion diseases. And you don’t necessarily know you have a build-up of deformed prions until decades later.