If you've set your sights on a quaint little house in the countryside, you should perhaps picture how it might look with a pig farm standing right next to it before you go ahead and buy it.
That is what happened to a small group of residents in Magħtab whose country homes will now neighbour a fattening facility for 80 pigs after the Malta Environment and Planning Authority board gave its go-ahead yesterday to an outline permit for the new farm. The details and the full development permit will be addressed in another sitting.
The area already includes a number of farms, nonetheless the residents were outraged that this new farm would practically stand back-to-back with their properties - with all the noise and bad odour problems it will bring with it.
They also pointed out that their residences were there before any of the farms and that a number of such farms were in disuse or were turned into something other than a farm - even the ones further away from residences - making the case for an alternative site to be found.
Mepa board chairman Andrew Calleja insisted that the development was in line with the authority's policy. "We just cannot afford to go against policy. We've been criticised in the past for doing that," he said.
One of the policies salient in this case demands that such a farm cannot stand closer than 200 metres from any inhabited area. However, the case officer pointed out that the law defines an inhabited area as a group of residences that together can take some 100 people. Counting only three to four families, the group of residents did not qualify as such.
This interpretation for "inhabited areas" is the same as that used to justify the presence of the fireworks factory that blew up last year in Għargħur right next to residences.
Mepa also has its own interpretation of a residential area, which is reserved for dwellings within the development zones - therefore excluding the hundreds of farmhouses that pepper the countryside.
On this basis, the 200-metre rule was discarded. But to make things worse for the residents, another policy - this time of the veterinary services - laying down that a pig farm should stand some 100 metres away from another pig farm for sanitary reasons was brought to bear on the case.
Right opposite these residences, about 127 metres away, is another pig farm. Applying a veterinary services rule meant placing the new farm even closer to the residents than the plot available would have allowed.
Instead of about 100 metres away from the residents, the pig farm will eventually end up being built at the equivalent distance away from the other farm and, therefore, some 27 metres away from the residences. With the facility being some seven metres wide, the distance is down to about 20 metres.
Moreover, it is only the farm's building that will be 20 metres away from the residents, as the perimeter of the development will more or less back the residents' properties. Not to have the farm expand even closer to the residents, the board inserted a condition before approving the permit laying down that the farm will be permitted to develop only the agreed footprint but no more.
The residents, however, protested against the development, often interrupting the proceedings with their plea for the board to use common sense. But the chairman would not have it, insisting that the authority would open itself to criticism for breaking policies.
"We don't have the luxury to use common sense," he said, attracting an even more desperate reaction from the residents: "We would have been better off had we been pigs. You're treating us worse than the pigs."
Ironically, when questioned about the rationale behind the veterinary services' 100-metre rule, the department's head, Anthony Gruppetta - who was present at the hearing - said that, scientifically, the policy did not make much sense as disease from one farm to the other could be carried over kilometres.
Along with the veterinary services, which "strongly recommended" the proposal, all the departments consulted, including the Public Health Department, have approved the proposal.
Dr Gruppetta said that the new farm was needed to alleviate the overcrowding at the developer's other farm in Pwales, which currently holds about 5,000 pigs - more animals than EU directives allow in relation to the size of that farm.