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.
Isn’t this why mad cow disease was ever a real problem in the first place?
Yep feeding dead cows to cows is the main way that mad cow disease shows up (there is also sometimes atypical mad cow disease where it shows up randomly too)
Well, since MCD is caused by prions, which can occur spontaneously in any healthy animal, it makes sense.
Prions are an amazing thing, the Wikipedia has a whole rabbit hole about them.
They come from naturally occurring protein building blocks, which unlike most proteins, are “flexible”, so they can flex into different shapes to join with multiple different proteins.
Well, it turns out sometimes they flex in an unusual way, matching proteins they weren’t supposed to, forming a “prion” protein that causes more of the flexible ones join proteins they shouldn’t, in a cascading effect.
There is no predicting when this could happen, and no way of preventing it since the flexible building blocks are essential for the normal functioning of many proteins. They just have a certain possibility of catastrophic failure, and that’s it.
Yeah, they’re really cool!