The rain sure is bad but at least there aren't 16,000 dead pigs oh wait nevermind

By Erik Crouch, June 17, 2015

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Call us crazy, but the headline "16,000 dead pigs found floating in Chinese river" feels like the kind of headline you'd only have to write once in your life.

This week's heavy rains and flooding throughout Southern China have wrought havoc on the nation's severely overcrowded pig farms, and, as of last night, there were about 16,000 drowned, dead pig carcasses floating about in Guangxi Province.

READ MORE: Crazy photos from Shanghai's flooding

There is a historical parallel here, and a recent one. It was just in 2013 that more than 16,000 dead pigs were found floating in Shanghai's Huangpu River, after they were dumped by farmers who had been growing them illegally, without proper health and sanitation safeguards (and, in some cases, they were held by people who bought the pigs already dead, to resell to butchers, which is also illegal).

It seems a bizarre coincidence that both cases of mass pig-death were specifically "16,000 dead." There must be some kind of deeper meaning to that - or maybe that's just the point where illegal pork farmers literally just can't fit any more pigs into a warehouse.

It does mean, however, that we can finally rehash all of the vocabulary from last time around. Aporkalypse comes to mind, as does Hogwash. We'll be hard at work to come up with a few more by the time this happens again (which will, from the looks of things, be sooner than we would have thought).

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