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APRIL 1999

Pigs blamed for Malaysian crisis

KUALA LUMPUR––The ongoing Asian fiscal crisis, global pork price collapse, and panic in Malaysia over lethal disease outbreaks might matter least to the pigs taking the brunt of the human terror. Come good times or bad for humans, pigs get killed.

As March ended, nearly 3,000 Malaysian troops shot or gassed pigs in ditches, in districts where as many as 900 farmers allegedly left the animals to starve or roam.

Eleven thousand villagers were evacuated before the shooting began.

One million pigs were to be killed by April 1, but the massacre reportedly progessed at a fraction of the intended speed due to pigs putting up frantic resistance.

“In other areas, witnesses said hog farmers beat to death their own pigs while others dumped pigs into mass graves to be buried alive,” wrote Andy Wong for Associated Press.

The Singapore Armed Forces meanwhile moved to kill all the wild pigs on Pulau Tekong island––believed to be the only pigs in Singapore other than zoo specimens.

As of March 27, two pig-linked illnesses had killed at least 63 Malaysians. Japanese encephalitis, JE for short, killed 18; a newly found Hendra-like virus often misdiagnosed as JE apparently killed the rest.

Pigs do not actually transmit JE, but were blamed for it because the culex mosquitoes who do carry JE often breed in pig wallows. JE kills about 10,000 people a year in other parts of Asia. Malaysia, however, has had only three previous outbreaks.

Other illnesses reportedy spreading in Malaysia were associated with pollution from decomposing pig carcasses.

The future of the Malaysian pork trade came into doubt after Thailand banned imports of Malaysian pigs and pork, while Singapore banned Malaysian pigs, pork, and horses. Malaysian pork sales fell 70%.

Post-crisis, Malaysian pig farmers will strive to regain market share with depleted breeding stock, little cash, less credit, obsolescent facilities, angry neighbors, and––so far––no firm promise of compensation for the loss of their herds.

Malaysian government credibility was hurt by repeated assertions in late 1998 that the “JE outbreaks,” the only illness then recognized, were “already over.”

Raising about 2.5 million pigs per year, the export-oriented Malaysian pork industry is dominated by ethnic Chinese. Ethnic Chinese form about a third of the Malaysian population, including most of the mercantile class. But more than half of all Malaysians are ethnic Malays, mostly Muslim, who don’t eat pork, consider pigs unclean, and often resent Chinese influence.

“Hollywood movies are censored to remove scenes with pigs in them, and the Malay word for pig is not used on TV,” the International Herald reported on March 24. “The Muslim opposition, which wants to see Malaysia become an Islamic state, could call for a ban on pork,” the I-H continued, citing remarks by Malaysian Strategic Research Centre executive director Abdul Razak Abdullah Baginda.

“The slaughter operation could also engender resentment among Malaysia’s Muslims in general,” the I-H added. “The vast majority of the soldiers, police, and civil servants involved are Muslim,” who might feel themselves tainted by handling pigs.

Trying to lower tensions and protect the pork industry, the Malaysian government on February 11 barred health officials below the cabinet level from addressing the media. On March 24 the government also banned publication of pig massacre photos, which were blamed for killing the public appetite for pork.

But leaders of the opposition Democratic Action Party and Malaysian Chinese Association insinuated that the government had moved slowly because most of the people falling ill or losing jobs were ethnic Chinese.

“Epidemiology has shown that the disease originated from pig farms that are filthy,” the Sarawak Tribune editorialized. “Is it true that Muslim enforcement officers find it uneasy to go to the farms on religious grounds? If so, a solution must be found.”

Seeking solution

The Malaysian government in mid-March announced it would vaccinate 30,000 pig farmers and 262,500 children who live near pig farms against JE; vaccinate all pigs who are not killed; and fog pig farms with pesticides to kill JE-carrying culex mosquitoes. The human vaccinations were suspended on March 26, however, as Muslim Malays balked at innoculation with a product cultivated in pigs.

Malaysian veterinary services director-general Mohamed Nordin Mohamed Nor also called for consolidating small pig farms into large operations that can be better policed. Pig farmers in several districts were ordered to relocate to state-built modern confinement megafarms after the Chinese New Year.

A similar order issued in Indonesia brought rioting on January 25 near Jakarta, after one farmer refused to move and a Muslim mob torched his facilities instead.

Thus far, however, there has not been similar violence in Malaysia.

The pig-killing began as word of the Hendra-like virus circulated amid rumors that mass vaccinations were failing.

The Hendra virus was first identified in Australia in 1994, when it killed 15 horses and three people who worked with horses. It apparently spread from flying fox bats.

Another Hendra-like virus, called Menangle virus, was later found in Australia. It appears to cause stillbirths and birth defects.

Commented Charles Calisher, viral disease moderator for the online emerging disease network ProMED-mail, “JE may occur in the Hendra-like virus epidemic areas, but it is undetermined what proportion of the human illnesses are due to JE and what proportion due to the Hendra-like virus. That characteristic illnesses have occurred in people who had received two or three doses of JE vaccine speaks to a non-JE etiology. We have no reports of illnesses in the families of pig farmers, or of cases occurring at a reasonable distance from pig farms, suggesting that direct contract with pigs or excretia, not arthropods, is the chief mode of transmission.”

Kindness

Appeals by some Malaysian leaders for more kindness toward animals, concurrent with the killing, seemed incongruous.

“Enhancing and promoting the human/animal relationship is one of our most important duties and obligations,” Malaysian agriculture minister Amar Sulaiman Daud declared in a February speech to the 15-month-old National Animal Welfare Foundation.

Sulaiman suggested that cats, chickens, ducks, and cage birds might be reared in schools to teach children appreciation of animals. NAWF deputy chair S. Sivagurunathan added buffalo and goats to the list.

But both omitted mention of pigs and dogs. Dogs, like pigs, tend to be considered unclean by Islamic Malaysians.

Works minister Seri S. Samy Vellu on March 8 told reporters that reading about an arson fire at a traveling animal show had spoiled his 63rd birthday.

“I feel really sad after seeing a picture in the newspaper of several people carrying a dead tiger,” Samy Vellu said. Samy Vellu also noted the deaths in the fire of 30 snakes, 10 spiders, an albino mongoose, and several dozen other small mammals.

Collapse

Malaysia has had two years of calamity, beginning with the drought-accelerated forest fires of mid-1997. The Indonesian, Malaysian, and Thai economies all fell soon afterward, pulled down by fire damage to their forest products and agricultural sectors.

As the economic disaster rippled through Asia, financial stress eroded demand for pork, with global impact. Pig farmers losing money and often losing their farms to banks or consolidators big enough to buy them out protested, demanding government aid, in Britain, Ireland, at least three Canadian provinces, Poland, and France.

The decline of the pork industry may also have contributed to sudden Czech willingness, after years of balking, to remove a state-owned pig farm from the site of a Nazi concentration camp near the south Bohemian village of Lety, where Romine gypsies were interned and more than 300 died.

By late 1998 even U.S. hog prices were at 1964 levels––the lowest on record, after adjustment for inflation.

Low pork prices in turn cut global demand for beef and chicken. Tyson Foods Inc. reported a mid-1998 drop of 41% in revenue from chicken parts usually sold to Russia and Asia––and went more than two months without even getting a Russian order.

National Cattlemen’s Beef Association economist Chuck Lambert objected that cattle producers lost $3.65 billion in equity during 1998, but did not get a federal bail-out; hog producers, losing $2.5 billion, got $50 million in special aid, and will get $250 million more if a March 19 U.S. Senate allocation gets House and White House approval.

The USDA also bought $65 million worth of pork for food programs in late 1998, and at Christmas 1998 announced an $80 million drive to buy and render 1.7 million infected pigs to fight the pig disease pseudorabies.

As a price support device, however, the pseudorabies program failed: prices for rendered goods fell due to oversupply.

Why massacre

Animal massacres for alleged public benefit date back at least to the purge of cats ordered by Pope Gregory IX in 1233 to curb a purported outbreak of witchcraft. A century of cat-killing left Europe open to the rat-borne fleas who brought the Black Death in 1334–– but cat massacres continued until after the Black Death nearly wiped out London in 1665.

Despite vastly expanded knowledge of disease control and prevention, such killing has not receded into history.

Responding to the first outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease to hit Taiwan since 1914, Taiwanese farmers and soldiers in killed 3.8 million pigs in early 1997––many of them reportedly burned or buried alive after inept electric stunning. The Dalai Lama, visiting Taiwan, prayed for the pigs’ souls.
Hoof-and-mouth disease actually afflicted just over one million pigs, on 6,103 of the 25,357 Taiwanese pig farms.

But the real impetus to the massacre was not the illness itself: it was that Japan, Singapore, and South Korea barred Taiwanese pork. Japan alone had bought 60% of Taiwanese pork output. About half of the 100,000 Taiwanese pig farm laborers lost their jobs.

Some Taiwanese politicans and media intimated that hoof-and-mouth disease ––apparently brought from China by pork smugglers––might have been deliberately introduced to destabilize the nation.

China meanwhile fought an outbreak of avian influenza that reportedly killed 1.5 million poultry on farms in Guandong province, near Hong Kong.

When China reclaimed Hong Kong from Britain in June 1997, it inherited growing panic over an avian flu variant, possibly from Guandong, that jumped from ducks to humans, killing six of the 18 people afflicted.

Denying any Guandong link, China in January 1998 showed off authoritarian clout and bolstered Guandong poultry sales to Hong Kong by ordering all Hong Kong civil servants to help kill every resident domesticated bird they could find, livestock or pet.

“Killing the chicken to scare the monkey,” as a Chinese proverb has it, the Communist Chinese regime has since 1949 used frequent dog massacres both to control rabies, the official pretext, and to warn the public against civil unrest.

Officials of the deposed Suhuarto regime in Indonesia used similar tactics in May 1998, just before Suharto fell, ordering the killing of more than 500,000 dogs, cats, and macacques to curb rabies in East Flores–– near rebellious Timor, which post-Suharto was given the option of independence.

Back at the ranch

Neither is panic-killing en masse unique to Asia.

The ongoing shootings of bison who might carry the cattle disease brucellosis into Montana from Yellowstone National Park is a high-profile U.S. example in microcosm of similar use of disease as a pretext for political muscle-flexing and economic protectionism. Relatively few animals are involved. Just 19 bison were shot during the winter of 1998-1999, down from a high of 1,100 in 1996-1997. But the killing goes on because other states may ban Montana beef if Montana loses USDA-certified brucellosis-free status.

Britain since 1986 has killed 4.4 million cattle to fight bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Of under 200,000 known BSE cases, worldwide, more than 90% have been found in Britain. The European Union may require Britain to kill four million more cattle by 2002, as a precondition for resuming beef exports.

The human form of BSE, called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, has so far been found in 45 people: 44 who ate British beef, one who apparently ate just French beef.

By contrast, the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, routine bacterial meat contamination kills 9,000 Americans per year.

But risks tied to slaughterhouse and butcher shop sanitation, or with longterm consumption, such as cholesterol build-up, don’t allow nations to protect their meat industries by halting imports. Viral diseases do.

Franklin D. Roosevelt learned the need for such a bogeyman back in 1933, when he formed the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to stabilize farm commodity prices. The AAA bought and killed millions of piglets, calves, chicks, and lambs––bringing Roosevelt the worst press of his career.

Roosevelt then set up the USDA school lunch subsidy program as a much more popular price support mechanism.

Despite the economic pain to pig farmers, there is no good news for pigs: factory farms are still starting wherever labor is cheap and environmental laws tenuous, including a $50 million Smithfield Foods project in Poland, announced on January 18.

The small-timers whose pigs wallow outdoors––and create puddles where mosquitoes breed––are being driven from the business, but the big-timers with the big money are betting pork consumption will only grow.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service northeast division refuge chief Richard Dyer reportedly intends to approve a New York Department of Environmental Conservation plan to kill 300 double-crested cormorants at Little Galloo Island in eastern Lake Ontario during May and June 1999. The plan is opposed by both the National Audubon Society and the Fund for Animals. Local fishers blame the cormorants for depleting smallmouth bass. The NY/DEC announced the plan to kill cormorants on March 13; USFWS prosecutors said six days later that they expect to accept plea bargains from as many as 15 Lake Ontario fishing guides who allegedly joined in illegally killing about 900 cormorants at Little Galloo in mid-1998. The cormorant killing will “ignore the fact that the predator depends on the prey for existence, and not the other way around,” said Fund national director Mike Markarian. Comments, which must arrive by April 14, may be sent to Paul Schmidt, Chief, Office of Migratory Bird Management, USFWS, 4401 N. Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22201; and to John Cahill, DEC Commissioner, 50 Wolf Road, Albany, NY 12233.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Jackson on March 19 agreed with the Humane Society of the U.S. that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should have prepared an environmental impact statement before extending the hunting season on snow geese an extra five and a half months, but refused to stop the already opened season because he said HSUS had not shown how halting it would serve the public interest. The joint U.S./Canada Arctic Goose Habitat Working Group recommended in 1998 that hunters should kill at least 2.5 million snow geese––half the total population––during the next several years to prevent tundra damage from goose-grazing along the western edge of Hudson Bay. The Dene tribe, who inhabit the region, oppose the scheme, denying that any such damage is occurring. Other critics argue that what the U.S. and Canada really ought to do is protect snow goose predators, including Arctic foxes and wolves in their summer habitat, and foxes and coyotes in their winter range along the northern edge of the Gulf of Mexico. Drought along the geese’ migratory path last summer and hurricane damage to their winter habitat are reportedly already reducing their population.

Bob Sallinger, director of the Audubon Wildlife Care Center in Portland, Oregon, in the Winter 1999 edition of Predator Press details how USDA Wildlife Services manufactured a recent series of coyote scares around Oregon while seeking public contracts to kill coyotes. To obtain the article, call the Predator Defense Institute at 541-937-4261, e-mail PDI at >>Predefense@aol.com<<, or visit the PDI web site, >>http://www.envirolink.org/orgs/pdi/index.htm<<.

Because Wyoming ranchers and hunters believe USDA Wildlife Services is insufficiently aggressive in killing coyotes, the Wyoming legislature in early March sent Governor Jim Geringer a bill––which he is expected to sign––authorizing creation of a state predator control board. Messages urging Geringer to veto the bill, HB 136, may be e-mailed to >>GOVERNOR@missc.state.wy.us<<.