A truck pulls up to the back of the plant and a guy gets out, pulls down his mask and wipes his nose. He hoists his pants and bangs on the back door where a sign reads “This is a safe work place. Please respect our workers.”
“I gotta delivery here. Open up the bay and get one o’ your lifts out here.”
“Is this the…”
“Yeah. Now, can you hurry it up. I got the sweats somethin’ awful.”
The guy sits in the truck and drinks the last of his water. In back, the panel slides up and he can feel the forklift drive on and begin offloading the crates of dead mink.
What do you do with 10,000 dead mink?
You make Covid Coats of course.
REF: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/09/us/mink-covid-outbreak-trnd/index.html
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Some of the thousands of mink culled to minimize the risk of them re-transmitting the new coronavirus to humans have risen from their shallow graves in western Denmark after gases built up inside the bodies, Danish authorities said Thursday.
“The gases cause the animals to expand and in the worst cases, the mink get pushed out of the ground,” Jannike Elmegaard of the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration said. He said it affected “a few hundred” animals.
The mink are buried in trenches that are 2.5 meters (8.25 feet) deep and 3 meters (10 feet) wide. A first layer of about 1 meter of dead mink are then covered with chalk before another layer of animals is laid, covered again with chalk and then with dirt, Elmegaard told The Associated Press.
But because the soil where they are buried is sandy, some have re-emerged. “We assume it is the mink that were in the upper layer that pop up,” he added calling it “a natural process.”
“Had the earth been more clayish, then it would have been heavier and the mink would not have resurfaced,” he told the AP. The animals who resurface are reburied elsewhere, and authorities guard the site to keep away foxes and birds.
Denmark culled thousands of mink in the northern part of the country after 11 people were sickened by a mutated version of the coronavirus that had been observed among the animals.
Mink buried
FILE – Thousands of killed mink are buried at Jydske Dragonregiment’s training ground at Noerre Felding near Holstebro in Denmark on Nov. 12 2020.Morten Stricker/NTB via AP
Earlier this month, the Social Democratic minority government got a majority in parliament to back its decision to cull all of Denmark’s roughly 15 million mink, including healthy ones outside the northern part of the country where infections have been found. The proposed law also bans mink farming until the end of 2021.
The government had announced the cull despite not having the right to order the killing of healthy animals, an embarrassing misstep that caused it to scramble to build political consensus for a new law.
Parliament also has to decide to pay compensation to the breeders. Danish mink farms are the world’s biggest supplier of mink fur, accounting for 40% of global production. Most exports go to China and Hong Kong.
There are 1,139 mink farms in Denmark, employing about 6,000 people. Breeders have said the culling will put an end to the industry. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Thursday visited a mink farm in northern Denmark and said it had been “emotional.” The operators “had their life’s work shattered in very, very short time,” she said, before wiping tears away with her sleeve.
“When we get on the other side of this … then I hope that they and all other mink breeders will remember that it is not because of them and that it is not because they have been bad mink breeders,” Frederiksen said.
The coronavirus evolves constantly as it replicates but, to date, none of the identified mutations has changed anything about COVID-19′s transmissibility or lethality.
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https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/05/europe/denmark-mink-cull-coronavirus-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
17 million mink headed for slaughter
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Thanks for a Christmas gift idea!
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Portland solved the mink problem years ago when protesters would throw blood on anyone coming out of the local mink store. It turns out mink drenched in blood don’t look so cool. Of course, it didn’t really solve the problem as the store just moved to a different city.
In case you missed it
And then there is this related story from Joseph Wilkinson of the New York Daily News quoted below.
“It’s just a thin slice.
Two meatpacking companies, each worth billions of dollars, were fined $15,615 and $13,494 by the U.S. Department of Labor after 10 of their workers died from corona virus earlier this year.
Six workers at a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colo., and four employees at a Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., died from COVID-19. . More than 300 people at the Greeley plant and nearly 1,300 at the Sioux Falls location contracted the virus.
JBS, the Brazilian-headquartered, largest meatpacking company in the world, was hit with the $15,615 fine based on a May 2020 inspection in Greeley. Smithfield was fined $13,494 after a spring inspection.
JBS reported $1.5 billion in net income last year. The federal fine is equivalent to 0.001% of that income. Smithfield, on the other hand, announced a paltry $183.8 million net income last year. Their fine was equal to 0.007% of 2019 income.
“A $15,000 ‘penalty’ from OSHA is nothing to a large company like JBS. In fact, it only incentivizes the company to continue endangering its employees,” union leader Kim Cordova, whose local represents about 3,000 workers at the JBS plant, said in a statement. “Many of our members, including the families of the deceased, are still struggling to overcome the devastating consequences from JBS’ inaction and negligence.”
The Department of Labor said the fines were the maximum allowed under law. The feds cited the companies “failing to protect employees from exposure to the coronavirus.”
And of course “Both JBS and Smithfield criticized the fines and said they plan to contest them.”
It turns out vital workers are easily replaced in our wealth based economy. What a surprise. Not.
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If the workers had died onsite, what would have happened to their bodies?
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Those people deserve the exact treatment they give animals.
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Soylent Green…
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I was afraid to admit I didn’t understand. Phil one upped me, probably revealed how insecure I really am. Phil called a spade a spade and I decided to sit on the sidelines with this “WTF?” feeling in my head…Yeah, anyway turn them into mink coats and spread the disease. Everyone else is spreading it. Like the president calling for a huge meeting in the Rose Garden…Ya see, I don’t understand much of what’s really going on these days anyway, so I’m sitting on the sidelines listening to music, Alan Watts, stuff like that. And, yeah, Phil is right about something else too…the Universe is nothing but music, all vibrations…
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Non sequiturs for breakfast. Crunchy yet satisfying… But only when you bite into the thick meaty parts.
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My grasp on reality is slipping which is why I’ve finally turned off the T.V. That’s been the single most positive unintended consequence of this entire Administration. My mornings with coffee, birdwatching, staring at my personal Bhoda tree while my cat lurks beneath my chair pensively waiting to catch a feathered fly-by are simply wonderful. Writing? Not quite yet.
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You have me beat. I do have a hummingbird feeder within my vista, though.
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And, by the way…I took the advice I gave you. (Sometime I wonder if I’m actually talking to myself when we chat…) I set up my weights in the garage and I’m pumping them three days a week…M,W,F…feels great, endorphins and all that…after I suggested you do it, I realized it was good advice after all…why wait for the heart attack?
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Dopple, dopple, the world’s a topple. We’ve all become bopple-heads, floppleing and woppling.
Good on you. Make sure you investigate your ancestry of disease.
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I don’t understand.
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I’d have thought that the luxury fur market was defunct. Nope.
Other species besides bats and humans can catch covid, including mink.
Recent news reported that 10,000 of these farmed critters have died from the disease.
But, as they were being farmed for for their skin, why toss them? Just turn ’em into coats which they were destined for anyway.
Who the hell buys a mink coat these days?
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