Christian farmers in Egypt have protested the mass culling of their pigs. The farmers, many of them poor, said that their pigs were healthy and that the cull meant destroying their livelihoods.

On Wednesday, the Christian farmers attempted to block the streets on the outskirts of Cairo to prevent government health ministry workers from destroying their pigs.

One person, Adel Ishak, said, “Our pigs are healthy. They are our capital and they have no diseases,” reports Medindia. Ishak feeds his pigs by collecting rubbish from the slums of Cairo.

The pig owners were also concerned that if their pigs were killed there would be no way to dispose of all the waste which was previously eaten by the pigs.

Despite the protests the Egyptian government killed 400,000 pigs in a move to counter the global panic caused by the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico.

When the H5N1 bird flu virus struck the world, Egypt was hit particularly hard. That experience may lie behind the pig culling, which one UN official has already described as a mistake.

The decision to cull the pigs has a disproportionate effect on Egypt’s Christian minority as Muslims consider pigs to be unclean and therefore do not rear them.

Gergis Faris, a 46 year old pig farmer, said, “We remind [President] Hosni Mubarak that we are all Egyptians. Where does he want us to go?... We are uneducated people, just living day by day and trying to make a living, and now if our pigs are taken from us without compensation, how are we supposed to live?”

The culling of the pigs was ordered by Egyptian Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali after a meeting with President Mubarak, according to The Times.