Why not slaughter all the pigs?

I'm sure we've all heard by now about the Egyptian government's move to slaughter all of the country's stock of pigs, kept by the Coptic Christian minority, supposedly in response to the outbreak of "swine flu" originating in Mexico. I use the inverted commas because it ceased to be swine flu in reality some weeks ago; it's flu, plain and simple, being passed from human to human. In this, the Israeli health minister who suggested it should be called Mexican flu is correct.

Unless someone can demonstrate that pigs are a recent import in Egypt, brought over by the British or Napoleon, it stands to reason that pigs have been farmed in Egypt since before Muslims were present, and Muslims have been in Egypt almost from the beginning of Islam. As is usual, they were allowed to keep pigs because not all of the Shari'ah applies to non-Muslims in an Islamic state. This would mean that pigs were present in Egypt for hundreds of years under the Khilaafa, including the Rightly Guided Caliphs, (رضي الله عنهم). No doubt there have been outbreaks of flu in that time which originated with them, and with the Muslims' chickens for that matter. I don't suppose the Caliphs slaughtered thousands of pigs or chickens in, say, Iraq or Morocco to hold back the epidemic once it had already started, by passing to human beings!

This is grandstanding, very obviously — Mubarak, a notoriously corrupt quasi-dictator, trying to look pious by doing something which generations of rulers who, righteous or not, ruled by the Shari'ah, did not do, rather like the Taliban who destroyed the Buddhas just as a show to the West and to their partisans, something that generations of better rulers than themselves never did. Muslims should not applaud him in this; it is a publicity stunt with no conceivable benefits to public health as any outbreak of the Mexican flu will be blown on the wind or brought by travellers from Europe or the USA, not from Egyptian pigs. In fact, if Egypt's pigs are less intensively farmed than those in Mexico — kept in huge factory "farms" in which thousands of pigs are kept in the dark and walking in their own shit — then those pigs are far less likely to cause an outbreak of flu than those in Europe or North America.