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Clickbaitish title, most pigs are slaughtered before reaching one year of age.

That's a very uncharitable way of interpreting the headline. From the article body: "the epidemic there alone has killed nearly one-quarter of all the world’s pigs".

What he's saying is that 100% of those pigs that died due to the epidemic would also have died within a year anyway. The title is crafted in such a way that you picture a whole, static population of pigs and a quarter is removed from this whole. Like we start 2020 with 75% of the individuals of 2019. As if the mortality rate shot from something normal up to 25%. When it actually was 100% all along.

Without the epidemic title could have been "All of the worlds pigs died in a year due to humans killing them to eat their body parts".

Not saying the epidemic is a good thing, but at the end of the day it doesn't make a whole lot of difference from an individual pig's perspective.

These pigs died before they could be eaten.

Hopefully that always happens.

Are you saying that these pigs are not used for food?

Yes, entire herds are being culled and dumped in mass graves rather than being slaughtered to try to bring the outbreak under control.

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