Suffocate chickens with firehose foam' - Feds
Farm chickens are constantly tested for Avian Influenza (“Bird Flu”) and if one bird tests positive the entire flock is euthanized and the farm must sit empty for weeks, according to the National Chicken Council (NCC).
All U.S. flocks are tested year-round for avian influenza, and if a single bird in a flock were to test positive for avian flu, then none of those birds would be allowed to enter the food supply. . . . When a case of avian flu is detected, the farm must remain empty for three weeks after the euthanasia, according to the following 5-step response plan.
- Quarantine
First, the farmer ensures that the affected flock stays put in one area, along with any equipment that has been near the birds. - Eradicate
The affected flock is then quickly and humanely euthanized. - Monitor Region
At the same time, both wild and domestic birds in a broad surrounding “control” area are tested and monitored for avian influenza. - Disinfect The farm where the flock was housed is then thoroughly disinfected to ensure any traces of the virus is killed.
- Test Last, the entire poultry farm is carefully tested for 21 days to confirm it is free of bird flu before allowing a new flock of birds to arrive. [Emphases added].
"Culling"
Euphemistically referring to the slaughter of the chickens as “culling,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “select[ing] from a group [as in] culled the best passages from the poet's work,” NBC News reported this week that, as a result of a “bird flu that began spreading globally in 2020 [a]lmost 59 million commercial birds have already been culled in the United States.”
Costs
Globally, The Guardian reported in December 2022, “Avian flu has led to the killing of 140m farmed birds since last October.” Since governments generally pay farmers for “culling” their healthy birds, the slaughter of more than 140 million of them has resulted in more than a billion dollars in costs borne by taxpayers.
Costs and compensation in the US for this year’s outbreak total almost $570m (£465m), the USDA said.
An EU source, who preferred not to be named, said: “According to the information provided, member states have spent about €440m (£380m) to combat avian influenza outbreaks.”
“Skyrocketing” inflation
While the farmers are reimbursed for their financial losses, the significant decrease in the supply of chickens and eggs is not alleviated by the government's reimbursement scheme, leading to inflation in the price of both and creating another cost borne by the same taxpayers forced to fund the slaughter. Gino Lorenzoni, an assistant professor of poultry science and avian health at Pennsylvania State University, and Kevin Snekvik, the executive director of the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory at Washington State University, weighed in on the extent of the inflation.
More than 40 million egg-laying hens have been culled in the U.S. alone, causing the price of eggs nationwide to skyrocket, Lorenzoni said. Months earlier, the “bird flu” outbreak drove the cost of turkey meat to record highs.
The virus can take commercial poultry farms out of commission for extended periods. “They have to remove dead birds, disinfect their facility and bring new birds in — that’s a several-month process to do that,” said Kevin Snekvik. . . . “That’s when production of eggs is hammered.”
Necessary?
The NCC's Questions and Answers on Avian Influenza (“Bird Flu”) clarifies the lack of danger avian flu poses to people.
Can human beings get “bird flu” from live birds such as chickens?
The risk of humans contracting avian flu is very low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Scientists say bird flu is not easily transmitted from birds to humans.
There are obvious risk factors for the transmission of the virus from live birds to people. Unless human beings are directly exposed to blood or excrement of infected poultry, avian influenza is a disease of birds, not humans. . . .
If a person gets “bird flu,” can he or she give it easily to other human beings?
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “sustained transmission” of avian influenza from human to human has NOT occurred. Despite the fact that millions of birds got sick and died in the middle of human populations in Southeast Asia in 2004-2006, “sustained transmission” did not occur.
CBS News revealed the simple way that people can avoid even the rare cases of avian virus in humans — cook the chickens and eggs.
Officials emphasize that this virus that's spread primarily through the droppings of infected wild birds doesn't threaten food safety or represent a significant public health threat. Sick birds aren't allowed into the food supply and properly cooking poultry and eggs kills any viruses that might be present. And health officials say no human cases of bird flu have been found in the United States during this current outbreak.
No air
The CBS News report focused on the difficulties inherent in requirements to quickly “cull” huge numbers of chickens, with individual farms sometimes required to kill more than 5 million birds.
The spread of a bird flu . . . raises the grisly question of how farms manage to quickly kill and dispose of millions of chickens and turkeys. It's a chore that farms across the country are increasingly facing as the number of poultry killed in the past two months has climbed to more than 24 million, with outbreaks reported nearly every day.
Some farms have had to kill more than 5 million chickens at a single site with a goal of destroying the birds within 24 hours to limit the spread of the disease and prevent animals from suffering.
Veterinarians and the USDA are thus called in as killing consultants; and as observers.
"The faster we can get on site and depopulate the birds that remain on site, the better," Minnesota State Veterinarian Beth Thompson said.
Lethal foam
Farms faced with the need to kill so many birds turn to recommendations by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Even as it has developed methods to kill the poultry quickly, the association acknowledges its techniques "may not guarantee that the deaths the animals face are painless and distress free." Veterinarians and U.S. Department of Agriculture officials also typically oversee the process.
One of the preferred methods is to spray water-based firefighting foam over birds as they roam around the ground inside a barn. That foam kills the animals by cutting off their air supply.
Gassing is substituted when foam cannot do the job.
When foam won't work because birds are in cages above the ground or it's too cold, the USDA recommends sealing up barns and piping carbon dioxide inside, first rendering the birds unconscious and ultimately killing them.
Too hot
Inducing heat stroke is the third method.
If one those methods won't work because equipment or workers aren't available, or when the size of a flock is too large, the association said a last resort is a technique called ventilation shutdown. In that scenario, farmers stop airflow into barns, which raises temperatures to levels at which the animals die.
The USDA and the veterinary association recommend that farmers add additional heat or carbon dioxide to barns to speed up the process and limit suffering by the animals.
Doubling down
The USDA stands by each of the three “culling” methods.
Mike Stepien, a spokesman for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said the techniques are the best options when it's necessary to quickly kill so many birds.
"State animal health officials and producers carefully weigh the different options to determine the best option for humane depopulation and do not make such decisions lightly," Stepien said.
Resistance
Animal rights groups are pushing back against the notion that these methods of mass slaughter are acceptable, noting that the harmful chemicals in firefighting foam which “essentially drowns birds” while they suffer convulsions and cardiac arrest. When it comes to the carbon dioxide alternative, merely breathing it is painful for the birds.
Animal welfare groups argue that all these methods for quickly killing birds are inhumane, though they are particularly opposed to ventilation shutdown, which they note can take hours and is akin to leaving a dog in a hot car.
Animal rights groups delivered a petition last year signed by 3,577 people involved in caring for animals, including nearly 1,600 veterinarians, that urged the veterinary association to stop recommending ventilation shutdown as an option.
"We have to do better. None of these are acceptable in any way," said Sara Shields, director of farm animal welfare science at Humane Society International.
Opponents of the standard techniques said firefighting foam uses harmful chemicals and it essentially drowns birds, causing chickens and turkeys to suffer convulsions and cardiac arrest as they die. They say carbon dioxide is painful to inhale and detectible by the birds, prompting them to try to flee the gas.
Alternative?
One activist would like to see the birds gassed in a less painful way, using nitrogen.
Karen Davis, of the nonprofit group United Poultry Concerns, urged the veterinary association to stop recommending all of its three main options.
"They're all ways that I would not choose to die, and I would not choose anybody else to die regardless of what species they belong to," Davis said.
Shields said there are more humane alternatives, such as using nitrogen gas but those options tend to be more expensive and could have logistical challenges.
Davis failed to mention another option to prevent pain and suffering among the birds - cancelling regulations requiring millions of birds in a flock to be “culled” when one bird tests positive for the flu.
See our previous article on the danger to the food supply:
