The drone, Nekhbet, had made great contributions during the trip to Egypt. Without it, Zhang Zian and the others might not have been able to leave the desert at all, or they might have been forced to turn back after just two or three days.
After leaving the desert, he bought it from Binhai University as a second-hand item. It was usually well maintained, and there weren't even a few scratches. He took it out from time to time because electronic products were not afraid of being used, especially when he went to the beach to scavenge or took Sihwa out to sea in the assault boat. With the drone monitoring from the sky, if a ship passed by nearby, it could be seen from afar.
Now was the time for it to show off its skills. Whether it was the electric fence or the vicious dogs, it didn't care.
Zhang Zian assembled the propeller, battery, and PTZ camera, and carefully controlled it to take off. He waited for it to fly out of the sparse forest at a low speed, then gave it the command to climb, using the fastest speed to rise out of the field of vision of the surveillance camera.
Nekhbet was very responsive. It climbed almost in a straight line, and the captured images were transmitted to the screen of the remote control in real time.
The entire slaughterhouse could be seen.
As Zhang Zian had guessed, the slaughterhouse was not big. Other than the only entrance and exit, the entire area was surrounded by electric fences. There were also people in security uniforms patrolling the factory with fierce Dobermans.
The entrance and exit were on the other side of the slaughterhouse, in the opposite direction from Zhang Zian. A simple road stretched into the forest.
The drone couldn't see the inside of the factory, and he didn't want to see bloody dismemberment scenes.
At that moment, a fleet of vehicles came from the distance. They were all transport vehicles, and the back of the vehicles had been modified and sealed with iron cages.
The fleet stopped at the door. After the security checked their identities, they opened the door and let the fleet in.
Some employees walked out of the factory, opened the back of the vehicles, and drove electric forklifts to move the iron cages from the vehicles into the factory.
Through the lens of the drone, it could be seen clearly that the iron cages were filled with deer, including white-tailed deer, black-tailed deer, sika deer, and so on.
These deer seemed to have a premonition of their own fate, shaking their heads and chirping anxiously in the narrow cages.
It was worth noting that every vehicle in the fleet had the logo of a certain deer farm.
What was going on?
Zhang Zian had previously speculated that the slaughterhouse might collect the dead deer in the forest for processing, or even illegally hunt wild deer to reduce costs. However, there was a loophole in this speculation that was difficult to explain. How did the slaughterhouse know where the wild deer had died?
The forest was vast, and wild deer that had died of natural causes or chronic wasting disease could have died anywhere. Before the deer carcasses could be found, the carcasses might have been eaten up by the scavengers in the forest.
From the looks of it, the raw materials of the slaughterhouse were live deer bought from the farm?
Did he wrongly accuse the manufacturer of the Leshi dog food?
This meant that all his previous guesses might have to be overturned. Although it was difficult for him to accept it, he could not let a bad person go, nor could he wrongly accuse a good person.
The drone was hovering high in the air, and none of the employees on the ground would look up at the sky for no reason, so he wasn't worried about being noticed for the time being.
This was not a popular hiking route, so tourists would not come here. In fact, most of the time, the security guards were just pretending. Their work was leisurely and safe.
Just as he was about to order the drone to return, he suddenly noticed the name of the farm on the vehicle. He ordered the drone to hover and then tried to open a webpage.
Open … Open … Open …
He muttered in his heart. After a few seconds, the webpage, although slow, was still displayed. It seemed that he could indeed surf the Internet here.
He searched for news related to this farm and quickly browsed through it. He noticed an inconspicuous piece of news at the bottom of the ranking.
According to the news, as the chronic wasting disease of deer had spread from the central United States to the western United States, and deer suspected of being infected had been found in sporadic areas of California, the California Deer Hunters Association had taken radical measures to prepare for a rainy day. They had proposed a series of related bills in the state legislature. One of the most controversial proposals was that in any farm, as long as one deer was found to be infected, they would be forced to kill all the deer in the farm.
Before this, if similar infectious diseases broke out in other animals, such as swine fever, chicken plague, mad cow disease, and the like, they would adopt the policy of killing the whole infected individual. However, this time, when it was the deer's turn, the deer farm owners refused to do so.
Another proposal was to prohibit the living bodies of captive deer, including blood and semen, from entering and leaving California.
The third proposal was to prohibit the establishment of new deer farms, and existing deer farms must raise the fences to prevent captive deer from escaping.
The reason the Deer Hunters Association proposed these three bills was that, so far, in areas where the disease had been found, most of the outbreaks had come from deer farms, and then it was suspected of spreading to wild deer.
If the disease was allowed to spread in California, it would seriously threaten the survival of wild deer. If all the wild deer died, wouldn't the Deer Hunters Association only exist in name?
These three proposals were, of course, strongly resisted by the various deer farms in California. They believed that there was no evidence to prove that the disease had broken out in the farms. Besides, who would pay for the higher fences? Who would be responsible for the losses of the farm owners?
The two factions fought incessantly in the state legislature, each using all the resources they had to persuade the state legislators to support their side.
At present, the two factions had not yet decided a winner, but the scales of victory had quietly tilted in favor of the Deer Hunters Association.
Due to the continuous spread of the disease and the rumors that the disease might be transmitted from deer to humans, many ordinary people, who had thought that it was none of their business, began to secretly worry. Most ordinary people did not care about the life and death of captive deer and wild deer, nor did they care about the losses of the capitalists in the farms. As long as they could effectively eliminate the danger they might face, they were willing to vote with their feet, and the state legislators had to take into account the will of the voters.
Once the Deer Hunters Association won, it was conceivable that the deer farm owners in California would suffer serious losses.
After reading the news, Zhang Zian tried to stand in the position of a farm owner and make an inference. If I were a deer farm owner, and I saw that I was in a disadvantageous situation in the state legislature, and I might suffer huge losses, should I try to sell all the captive deer before I was forced to kill them? Even if I sold them at a low price, it was better than being killed unconditionally.
There was an old saying in China, "When you have a lot of money, you don't count the hair on your head." It was very philosophical and forward-looking.
If that was the case, it would make sense.
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