FOOTAGE has emerged showing inside a 26-storey skyscraper that is set to be used as a mass pig farm.
The Chinese Government claim the building, which has been dubbed the “Pig Palace,” was opened earlier this month and can hold up to 650,000 animals.
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According to local reports, the bizarre complex in Ezhou, Hubei province has been an ambitious £500 million project undertaken by local authorities in a bid to increase agricultural productivity.
The farm comprises of two buildings – containing 26 floors each – and “boasts labour efficiency, green ecology, and lower comprehensive cost” experts claim.
Promoters of the project add that nearly 25,000 animals will be housed on each level and are transferred throughout the complex via underground “pig-catch channels.”
They noted that when it’s fully operational the farm will be capable of processing 100,000 tons of meat at once with an estimated 1.2 million slaughters a year.
The “modern” pig farm, thought to be one of many across the country, has reportedly been introduced amid a rise in China’s demand for pork.
Experts believe that building large farms like these is one way to replenish its herd which has been decimated in recent years by African swine fever
However, the huge complex, which is set to be fully automated, has split opinion among animal lovers in China with the pigs set to be kept in the factory-like conditions.
It promoted promotors to address concerns over sanitation and poor treatment, ensuring that the pigs are not crowded and can move around in their floor.
“The waste water is treated on site,” said Zhuge Wenda, site manager, in an interview with local Hubei television.
“Our project makes it possible to reach the zero level of excrement emissions with also very low greenhouse gas emissions.
“In addition, our biosecurity control system, added to a scientific diet, makes it possible to improve the quality of the meat in order to meet the demand of the population for pork of a good standard and less expensive.”
It come just five years after images first emerged of a farm breeding “grotesque” mutant pigs with “double muscles” in Cambodia.
Many of the animals had enlarged genitals and appears too muscly to even walk properly.
Some quipped the pigs looked like they’ve been gorging on steroids and pumping iron in the gym.
MUTANT PIGS
Since the images first emerged, experts believed they are the result of research being carried out in South Korea that will either have you licking your lips or recoiling in revulsion.
Jin-Soo Kim, a molecular biologist at Seoul National University who is leading the work, told science journal Nature, that by altering the genes you can quickly create the perfect pig for slaughter.
He said: “We could do this through breeding.
“But then it would take decades.”
Years of cross-breeding has created the enormous Belgian Blue cattle.
But Kim’s team have by-passed this method and created the bulked-up pigs by tinkering with a “myostatin gene”.
This gene usually keeps the growth of muscle cells in check.
But when that gene is altered this does not happen and therefore the pig begins growing more than twice its normal size.
The editing produces a higher muscle mass and this means more meat to yield and less fatty pork.
They say it is safe because rather than transplanting genetic information from one species to another they have simply edited genes.
It is hoped that the sperm from the pumped-up pigs will be sold around the world to boost meat production.
But presently no country allows its people to eat the genetically modified products.
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