Sunday, December 2, 2012

Their TAILS fracking DROPPED OFF?

I know human beings have a pretty high tolerance for idiotic shit, but honestly, if flammable tapwater isn't enough to make you wonder if most fossil fuel companies aren't happy enough to outright kill somebody for a buck, than sweet Whistlin' Jesus on a Petrified Stegosaurus, think of the cows:

Schilke’s troubles began in the summer of 2010, when a crew working at this site continued to force drilling fluid down a well that had sprung a leak. Soon, Schilke’s cattle were limping, with swollen legs and infections. Cows quit producing milk for their calves; they lost from sixty to eighty pounds in a week; and their tails mysteriously dropped off. (Lab rats exposed to the carcinogen 2-butoxyethanol, a solvent used in fracking, have 
lost their tails, but a similar connection with cattle hasn’t been shown. In people, breathing, touching or consuming enough of the chemical can lead to pulmonary edema and coma.)  

An inveterate label reader who obsessively tracks her animals’ nutritional intake, Schilke couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Neither could local veterinarians. She nursed individual cows for weeks and, with much sorrow, put a $5,000 bull out of its misery with a bullet. Upon examination, the animal’s liver was found to be full of tunnels and its lungs congested with pneumonia. Before the year was out, five cows had died, in addition to several cats and two dogs. (Hair testing of Schilke's  cats and dogs revealed elevated selenium levels, while water tests showed sulfate at levels high enough, Schilke's vet told her, to cause polio in cattle.) Inside Schilke’s house today, where the china cabinets are kept empty for fear of a shattering drill-site explosion, nearly a dozen cats sneeze and cough, some with their heads tilted at a creepy angle. 

The article from The Nation explains that animals that die from environmental causes don't make it directly into our food chain, but are sometimes ground down to feed others...which do.  
Simply put--that's fucked up.



3 comments:

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

What a horrible story, it's eerily reminiscent of The Colour Out of Space... The Colour Out of Halliburton?

Governor Cuomo had better fight fracking in upstate New York tooth and nail- we're talking about the drinking water for millions and millions of people.

Vixen Strangely said...

Here in PA, the govnah loves some fracking more than anything, even tax money. We have a funny old thing where doctors cannot discuss whether someone's symptoms seem like they could be the result of fracking-related disorders. So the doctors can witness the atrocities, just not speak of them? Or so the poor pitiful human livestock's tails can drop off, without anyone knowing why, too?

(Funny, I thought of Lovecraft, too. It's just that it's real. Which makes it that much more eldritch and rugose, somehow.)

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

{snagglepuss} Squamous, even! {/snagglepuss}

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