Animal welfare groups go to great lengths to show us how "the sausage" is made inside the factory-style farms that produce most of our meat. For the past few years, they've armed activists with video cameras and sent them undercover to document alleged abuses or risky practices.
On Thursday, the Humane Society of the U.S. released its latest video — a look at how one hog farm in Kentucky is dealing with porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, or PEDV. The fast-spreading virus has killed more than 2 million piglets in 25 states in the U.S. since April 2013.
Let's just say it isn't pretty. (The video is available on the Humane Society's website, but we should warn you that it's very, very graphic.)
In this video, we learn what happens to the piglets at Iron Maiden Hog Farm in Owensboro, Ky., that succumbed to the virus: The animals' intestines are ground up and fed, as a "smoothie" — as HSUS dubs it — back to the sows, which could be their own mothers. (The exact size of the farm is unknown, but the barn shown in the video houses about 2,400 sows.)
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