practice was banned in the United Kingdom in and will soon cease
throughout the European Union.) Once weaned, farrows are confined, not
unlike broilers-to-be; kept medicated; and are encouraged to feed almost
continuously in gloomy semidarkness until in a short time they are ready
for the slaughterhouses, which are themselves a well-documented horror
for workers as well as animals.^26
Then there is the industry’s cumulative effect on air and the waters.
The first is rendered dangerous, and the latter is ‘‘turned to blood,’’ just as
threatened (or promised) in the terrifying last book of the New Testament.
Murphy and other confinement integrators resisted regulation. By the mid-
and late s, the government finally imposed moratoriums on construc-
tion of new pork operations, and North Carolinians, black and white, had
organized themselves to force fume abatement. Whether Wendell Mur-
phy, a native of the region, after all, ultimately would have responded con-
structively became moot in , when he sold Murphy Family Farms to
Smithfield Foods. Smithfield is of Smithfield, Virginia, where Pagan Creek
empties into the James, not far west of Hampton Roads and the bottom
of Chesapeake Bay. Smithfield Foods’ chief executive, a native of this low
landscape so similar to eastern Carolina, lives and works in Manhattan.
His corporation, meanwhile, has been one of the most flagrant scofflaws in
the region. It is the Tyson’s of tidewater, Virginia, dumping slaughterhouse
wastes into the Pagan, silently daring the state’s environmental protection
agency to act, then paying relatively modest fines if officials are paying at-
tention. That Smithfield will be a better corporate citizen in North Carolina
seems a possibility as dim as the atmosphere in a chicken or hog barn.
tThirty years before Smithfield took over Murphy Farms and North Caro-
lina became premier pork producer, Audie Leon Murphy, near-mythic suc-
cessor to Daniel Boone, was killed in a small plane crash near Roanoke,
Virginia, just short of his forty-seventh birthday. An old buddy observed
that it took a bad pilot and a mountain to do him in. Since his picture had
appeared on the cover ofLifewhen he came home from Europe in ,
Murphy had become a Californian, starred in B+ westerns, married twice,
and fathered two sons—all despite unending nightmares and flashbacks
from the war, a taut edginess that led to fights and lawsuits, and a reckless
propensity to gamble. But then he failed as a movie producer and, appar-
ently, lost all his money. Aside from his many medals, his personal effects
included a huge collection of firearms, military and others, suggesting con-