The images in the following program are highly sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals, praying that you will help to stop it.

It’s January 1, 2011 in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. In the chilling winter, pigs are pushed into a pit by a metal crane. Each frantically struggles to get up, stunned. Instinctively, they huddle to one end of the pit as others come helplessly tumbling, colliding down. One piglet failed to survive the deep fall. He is lucky. The other 400 pigs in this pit died a much slower death as they were slowly, hellishly buried alive.

The highly contagious foot and mouth disease virus had struck hard in South Korea around November 2010. Symptoms seen in the livestock animals included high fever and painful blisters inside the mouth and on the feet. It spread like wildfire, and by January, the massacring had begun. Millions of cows, pigs, goats and deer were buried in a rushed attempt to stop an even more severe epidemic.

Mass killing, is the routine response to foot and mouth disease, one of the most dreaded livestock diseases throughout the world. Mr. Lee Won-Bok, president of the Korea Association for Animal Protection, attended 15 of the mass burials. Fifteen, that is, out of a shocking 4,000 pits scattered across the country.

They dump and drop live pigs from trucks into the pit. There are 1,500 to 2,500 pigs in one small pit, and the pigs climb up on each other’s backs, piling double, triple layers as they’re buried alive. The pigs scream, groan and cry out for their lives. I haven't had any sleep for a month because I was haunted by the screaming sounds. The slaughtering site is literally a horrible hell itself.

Other species besides pigs were also killed in recent months.

For chickens, they put 3 to 4 live chickens in a sack, tie it, and carrying them by carts bury the sacks in a pit. The chickens scream feeling sharp pain of their bones shattering in the sack. It’s so horrible.

One South Korean count in February revealed staggering numbers: some 6.2 million chickens and ducks were destroyed due to avian flu. For foot and mouth disease, it was over 150,000 cows, over 6,000 goats, 3,000-plus deer, and over 3.3 million pigs. Their burial sites today are eerily silent. Signs – like tombstones – identify the species and number of animals in each grave.

As you can see, 3,900 animals have been buried over there 200 meters away from here, and 3,000 animals have been buried here. Over on the other side diagonally, 2,000 have been buried. One thousand and nine hundred animals have been buried in the back. So that’s 12,000 live-buried animals in just this area right before us.

I had taken a look around the sites myself, and the feeling was much different when I was there first-hand as opposed to just watching it on TV.

Humans too were victims. Reports stated that approximately 130 workers were injured in the process of burying the panicked animals, which at times took all day and night. Some ended up seeking mental help. At least 9 workers died, reportedly due to “overwork,”

In 1997 in Formosa (Taiwan), up to 200,000 pigs were killed per day, mainly by electrocution. In the US, one method is stunning and pithing. In this method, a stun gun punches a metal bolt into the animal’s head, breaking the skull; then, a rod is shoved into the stunning hole to utterly destroy the brain.

In South Korea, the method was live burial.

When foot and mouth hits, most people think about the economic cost and not about the welfare of the animals, sadly. Countries decide often on a kind of emergency basis, to kill the animals, to cull them. Culling seems to be a sort of polite word for mass killing. And often, the animals are killed in huge numbers, not just the infected animals, but sometimes animals nearby, animals in the certain area.

Ironically, many of the animals killed were healthy, their only sin being their proximity to a suspected outbreak.

Foot and mouth disease is an infectious disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals. Its virus covers a large area in a short time, affecting a large number of susceptible animals, including camels, cattle, bison, sheep, goats, pigs and deer, etc. Affected adult animals have a low mortality, while young animals can have a high mortality.

The reason that this disease is always a serious consideration is its rate of spreading and infecting. The virus can even be carried by the wind to hundreds of kilometers and it spreads via any daily objects due to the fact that the size of this virus is very small. Then, the disease immediately takes place if the animals and livestock are susceptible. Generally, once the disease affects a part of the herd, the whole herd will be infected. The percentage of spreading is very high. But the percentage of death is low.

Even if infected, most animals can recover if allowed. And cases of humans being infected are extremely rare. So why the brutal, destruction of so many animals? Greed is the main reason.

It is really terrifying that this live burial is our selfishness – human selfishness that cares for nothing but our own interest, and that selfishness has become socialized and authorized, and that power became the authoritative power that killed, in an instant, 3 million livestock animals in this country.

In South Korea as in Mongolia, the government attempted to halt the spread of the virus through widespread vaccination of livestock. But so far, this has proven to be costly – and unreliable. In South Korea, over 2,000 vaccinated cows and pigs still got infected, while more than 6,300 new animal deaths have been linked to the vaccine itself.

There are 7 different types of viruses. And with globalization, the exchange of goods, and tourism, the types of viruses could hit anywhere and anytime. So in order to make sure that we are protected, vaccines need to be given against 7 different viruses, which is extremely expensive. So the best situation is not to get that disease in the territory.

So what you are saying is that once the animal is affected and then gets cured, he still carries the virus?

Yes, some of them, and we don't know who carries the virus or not.

Once rare and isolated, foot and mouth epidemics have been striking more frequently and harder across the globe. Experts attribute this to the widespread practice of factory farming.

In order to produce meat in large amounts at once, lots of livestock are crowded in one spot by people, in a form of factory farming. And this in itself creates a very powerful infectious disease-causing area. Many diseases are being caused by this.

Ninety-nine percent of livestock farms in South Korea are run as factory farms. Every animal is raised tied and locked up in a tiny space in there. In such conditions, they don’t have the immunity to fight against any tiny germs or viruses coming into their body and this leads to serious infectious diseases such as foot and mouth disease and avian flu.

The purpose of cattle, poultry and pig farming and the like are business and money. When livestock are crowded in one spot in such big numbers, there’s a huge possibility for that area to become the source of infectious diseases.

There is no consideration for life at all, but only concern about how much weight the animals can gain per serving of feed. So antibiotics are used before diseases break out; the teeth are pulled out before animals bite one another or tail is cut off; and in case of a hen, the beak is cut off, and so on. But, more importantly, factory farms are very condensed. If we don’t solve this density problem caused by the greed for money, this outbreak will continue to happen again next year.

We have to find another solution to this. How we treat the animals is how we will be treated. We all have to be in balance. We’re forcefully overriding this balance by raising livestock in mass numbers and then slaughtering them to eat.

Each pit measured about 10 meters long, 30 meters wide and 10 meters deep. A mass grave shared by hundreds of live, terrified, screaming pigs, whose intelligence has been equated to that of a 3-year-old human child. When the South Korean public saw the images of the live burials emerge, they erupted in outrage, as well as pangs of guilt and sorrow.

I personally decided to stop eating meat through this incident.

With recent foot and mouth disease outbreaks also reported in multiple countries, Supreme Master Ching Hai has addressed the serious implications of livestock-related diseases, as during an October 2009 videoconference in Formosa (Taiwan).

In one of the worst animal disease outbreaks to hit the island of Formosa (Taiwan), the virus called hoof-and-mouth disease was transmitted from one pig that came to the island in early 1997. Within just six weeks, 6,000 farms had been stricken, resulting in the tragic slaughter, massacring 3.8 million pigs. This gives you some idea of how quickly animal-borne diseases can spread, causing devastation for themselves and humans alike.

The best is to abolish meat altogether. Because animal consumption is eating up our planet, is killing us humans The livestock sector is probably the world's biggest source of water pollution as well The list never ends if we continue to partake in this killing phenomena, massacring tragedy called “animal industry.”

We sorrow for the loss of both countless innocent animals and perished humans, as we pray that this cruel crisis will stop.

Thank you, gentle viewers, for joining us today. Please tune in again next Tuesday, May 3, as we continue our 2-part series on more sides of the global tragedy of foot and mouth disease. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News. May all sentient lives on Earth be cherished and respected.