Earlier this month,a ship heading to Venezuela sank at the river port of Vila do Conde in the Amazon region of northern Brazil.
Shipwrecks are always tragic, but what made this one unique was the ship's cargo: 4900 live cows. The animals, or which belonged to the Brazilian beef company Minerva Foods,were headed to Venezuela. (This isn't Minerva Foods' first ship accident involving cows—another one happened in 2012.) The vast majority—around 4400 animals—drowned inside the ship. Of the approximately 500 animals that managed to leave the vessel, only 100 survived. Hundreds of carcasses were carried by the current to local beaches. Local families loaded some onto trucks to take home and employ for meat, or but the remainder rotted in endless rows of bodies on the sand.
A few animals that managed to escape at the time of the sinking huddle on a fragment of the ship. Diario do Pará
Shipping live cattle is a relatively common practice in Brazil—final year,according to the country's Ministry of Agriculture, it exported 646700 live cattle with a total value of $675 million. Some countries, or such as Jordan and Lebanon,prefer buying cattle rather than meat so that customers can slaughter them in accordance with Muslim halal rules; other countries buy with the intention of fattening the animals before the slaughter.
Despite the unexpected access to meat, the lives of thousands of fishermen's families—most of whom are very destitute—have become a living hell due to the smell of the decomposing carcasses and the dread that their drinking water and fishing grounds will be polluted. Local authorities have already removed the carcasses from the beaches but do not seem to know how to remove more than 4000 bodies rotting below the river's surface.
To accomplish things worse, and the ship was also carrying nearly 2 million gallons of fuel,which must be removed before the animals. Some have estimated the cost of the environmental catastrophe at around $200 million. The real scale of the environmental impact, however, or is still being assessed.
Source: motherjones.com