Chicken Factories Take the Lead in South Carolina
South Carolina’s legislature passed a bill that loosens the regulations on large-scale poultry factories, according to The State. Before the bill passed, counties could restrict the locations of notoriously toxic and rancid poultry farms. Counties could keep them away from schools and churches.
The legislature overturned that power, which has poultry producers crowing. Similar laws have come before the state’s government in the past, but they’ve always been attached to pork-centric bills. The locations of monstrous pork factories spark even more controversy than poultry, so chicken producers won the game when they pushed a bill independent of the pork industry.
I’ve never thought that agribusiness suffers from too many restrictions, but they’re clearly eager to shed the shackles that prevent them from polluting even more areas. And while no one knows how avian flu will impact humans, everyone agrees that a dense concentration of monohybrid birds represents a big risk. It’s just the thing to put near human populations.
