Chinese criminals are using drones to drop items infected with African swine fever into pig farms. They are also spreading rumors about the virus.
The disease has reduced the country’s pig herds by over 40 percent because of mass culling to stop the spread of the virus. The resulting shortages have seen pork prices more than double.
And that’s where the criminals step in.
Their actions force farmers to sell their pigs at lower prices. The gangs then buy the pigs and smuggle the animals or their meat to other areas where prices are higher, defying a van on transporting pork or livestock between provinces.
Police believe that one gang smuggled four thousand pigs from a province in a single day. Smugglers are bribing inspectors and faking quarantine certificates. Their activities are escalating between now and the Lunar New Year in late January, when demand is expected to peak.
G. K. Chesterton observed, “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.”
The change every human needs
No matter how diligently law enforcement professionals work, those who want to break the law seem to find a way to do so. That’s because, in the final analysis, laws do not change character. They can restrain and sometimes prevent actions, but they do not create or confer integrity.
The change every human needs must come more deeply.
When Billy Graham was asked to identify the greatest problem in our world, he replied simply, “the human heart.” He then cited Jeremiah 17:9, which states, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick.”
The good news is that Jesus can change any heart that is opened to him. If he could make a man who denied him into the preacher of Pentecost and a persecutor of Christians into the author of half of the New Testament, there is nothing he cannot do with your life.
Do you agree?
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