A porky problem

[The Succubus]

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/dead-pigs-china-river-exceed-13-000-media-035710891.html#2tGgOh5

This is something I've been keeping half an eye on on Yahoo (please don't read the comments. Never read Yahoo comments) and I did some quick spur-of-the-moment maths on it:

Losing one pig - understandable.
Losing a small herd of pigs - perhaps.
Losing thirteen *thousand* pigs - impossible.

Your average pig is about 1.5 metres long (thanks, Wikipedia) and lets say about 0.5 metres wide, giving us a rough surface area of 0.75 square metres, assuming our porker is standing upright and healthy.

0.75 x 13,000 = 9,750 square metres of pig, or another way of looking at it is an area 3km long by 3km wide full of pig *suddenly appearing in the middle of a freaking river*.

Something to think on, or at least something preferable to thinking about the quality of the local drinking water...

Where on earth did they all come from and how did they get into the river without anyone noticing?

Answers below please. =3

[Traab]

Its not like suddenly 13k pigs showed up in the river one morning. This looks like a long running problem in an area that is heavily oriented at livestock production. From the sounds of it, as their pigs die, the farmers dump the carcasses in the nearest river and let mother nature take care of getting those corpses off their property. 13k is how many pigs have been pulled out of the river in several spots total over a nonspecific time frame.

[shawnhcorey]

Sounds like a cover-up for another scandal. The Chinese officials love to hide their problems. See the Chinese milk scandal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal).

[Serpentine]

Its not like suddenly 13k pigs showed up in the river one morning. This looks like a long running problem in an area that is heavily oriented at livestock production. From the sounds of it, as their pigs die, the farmers dump the carcasses in the nearest river and let mother nature take care of getting those corpses off their property. 13k is how many pigs have been pulled out of the river in several spots total over a nonspecific time frame.More than 9,000 in one river in less than a month is still pretty substantial...

[Eldan]

0.75 x 13,000 = 9,750 square metres of pig, or another way of looking at it is an area 3km long by 3km wide full of pig *suddenly appearing in the middle of a freaking river*.

You're a bit off on your numbers here, just saying. That's more like a hundred meters by a hundred meters of pig.

[Bhu]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21178793

Vaguely similar but scarier story in africa a few months back...

[factotum]

You're a bit off on your numbers here, just saying. That's more like a hundred meters by a hundred meters of pig.

Yeah--you'd need around twelve million pigs to fill a 3km square using your 0.75m^2 per pig estimate.

[Brother Oni]

Sounds like a cover-up for another scandal. The Chinese officials love to hide their problems. See the Chinese milk scandal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal).

There aren't any party officials involved this time, unlike the the milk one. This seems to be just businessmen (or in this case, farmers apparently) taking deliberate shortcuts to maximise their profits.

Since you're appear to be rather keen to put the boot in to the 'Chinese officials', you missed the heparin scandal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_heparin_contamination) as well..