Obviously you generally don’t come to Pedestrian for agriculture news, but I feel like this particular yarn is entirely within our wheelhouse. Here goes: A WA pig farm has been fined half a million bucks and two of his workers jailed over a crackpot scheme to smuggle Danish pig semen into the country in order to create – and I quote – some sort of “super pig”.
Here’s the kicker. The highly illegal pig cum was concealed in shampoo bottles on flights to Perth. Shampoo bottles. Sloshing with pig jizz. I don’t mean to be deliberately gross but that’s just how it is.
9News reports that at least 200 pigs were artificially impregnated with the goal of increasing litter sizes.
As you might expect, this genius plan, which involved a secret breeding program at a Pinjarra piggery using the criminal cum in question, runs afoul of Australia’s notoriously strict biosecurity laws. Turns out that Danish genes risk exposing WA pigs to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, which has the charming colloquial name “pig plague”.
The Danish-owned company in question is named GD Pork. Sole director Torben Soerensen has been sentenced to three years in prison, and breeding manager Henning Laue is facing two years behind bars for his role in aiding the scheme.
Federal agriculture minister Bridget McKenzie used the case as a reminder that breaches of biosecurity law are not to be tolerated:
This case shows a disturbing disregard for the laws that protect the livelihoods of Australia’s 2,700 pork producers, and the quality of the pork that millions of Australians enjoy each year.
GD Pork imported the semen illegally in an attempt to get an unfair advantage over its competitors, through new genetics.
Well, there you go. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can’t smuggle pig jizz into Australia with shampoo bottles or you’ll go to jail. Consider this your first and final warning.
