Pig farm admits to dumping corpses

China.org.cn, March 14, 2013

A pig farm in Zhejiang's Jiaxing City?yesterday confessed to dumping dead pigs into the Huangpu River, local authorities said without naming the farm or giving any specific number of dead pigs it had dumped into the water.

Nearly 6,000 dead pigs had been pulled out of a section of the Huangpu River in Shanghai as of Tuesday.

According to the local government, the admission came after a preliminary investigation traced the birthplace of some of the dead pigs found in a section of the river in Shanghai to Jiaxing.

Shanghai has provided 14 ear tags collected from the dead pigs, and Jiaxing is still investigating 13 of these tags.

The number of dead pigs recovered from the Huangpu River in Shanghai rose above 6,600 after another 685 carcasses were plucked out of the waters as of yesterday afternoon.

Local media had previously reported that the corpses may have come from the upper reaches of the Huangpu River in Jiaxing City.

The Jiaxing city government said a total of 70,000 pigs died due to crude raising techniques and extreme weather at the beginning of the year. All the collected corpses were disposed of safely, and no mass swine epidemic had broken out in the region so far.