Bird flu has been making a sneaky comeback for years, but with COVID-19 in the news, the non-epidemiologists among us didn’t give it much thought. That is, until the cost of eggs went off the charts.
ABC reported on how the price surge was hurting small businesses. Memes about the difficulty of putting breakfast on the table multiplied. Then bird flu spread to cows, an entirely new phenomenon. One person, a woman from Louisiana, died after being infected. Some outlets began sounding the alarm about how catastrophic bird flu could be if grew more infectuous to humans.
The average headline goes like this one from CBS — “As bird flu ravages poultry industry, the damage spreads.” Most stories center the economic impact of the latest strain on the industry and the potential for a pandemic in humans. Missing from the headlines are the 148 million chickens farmers have killed so far to prevent the virus from spreading further.
In discussing the practice of “ventilation shutdown plus” used in many factory farms during disease outbreaks like the current bird flu crisis, infectious disease researcher Michael Osterholm told Reuters, “You’re being humane and putting them down. If you did nothing for several days, the barn would be dead anyway.”
A year ago, I wouldn’t have batted an eye at this sentence. After all, it’s true — 90-100% of chickens will die when bird flu enters an impossibly packed warehouse — so what else can farmers do?
Now, I question what could be humane about creating an environment in the first place whose crisis management requires killing thousands of chickens at once by turning up the temperature in their housing and waiting for them to die of heatstroke over the course of hours.
It would be one thing if we needed such a high output of animal products for our health, but research has consistently shown that’s not the case. It can be affordable, healthy, straightforward and joyful to change your eating habits to more plant-based foods. So when leaders present the issue as “How can we contain bird flu in farmed animals?” it’s worth asking why we keep so many animals caged to kill at all.
Efforts to address bird flu mostly focus on tightening up farm facilities, killing infected animals and frantically tracking a rapidly branching tree of viral strains. Yet most media coverage fails to acknowledge the reality of animal farming itself.
Chickens raised for meat, for instance, almost all live in sheds of 20,000-odd birds crowded together. Even “cage-free” chickens spend most of their lives crowded indoors. Because they’re bred to grow at a pace that would make a newborn human baby weigh 660 pounds at two months old, their legs and hearts often cannot support their bodies. They stand in or collapse onto their feces, which are high enough in ammonia to burn their tissue. They are social beings, but living with so many other chickens disrupts their order and can stress them to the point of pecking themselves and others. To prevent this, the industry often opts to remove parts of their beaks without anesthesia.
Under these conditions, “factory farming disease control” is almost an oxymoron. With immune systems weakened by stress and often heavy antibiotic use, chickens’ defenses are low to begin with. Combine this with overcrowding and the fact that these chickens are highly genetically similar, and you have a prime breeding ground for outbreaks. Their short lifespans may boost viruses’ odds of evolving to be more infectious, since a slow-adapting virus won’t have time to kill the animal before our taste for Chick-fil-A does.
Crises like bird flu reveal how animal agriculture, something that unfolds out of sight and out of mind, shapes our society’s most pressing issues.
It obviously affects the animals, who get the least attention even though they’re the ones infected by the virus and “depopulated” by humans. There’s the fact that human transmission disproportionately harms farm workers, who work for an average of $13.59 per hour, often in rural areas where it’s hard to find less dangerous jobs, and who are made up in large part of immigrants lacking permanent legal status. And the virus’s spread shows the inability of the agriculture-government bloc to respond to public health crises. The government lagging to take measures to test milk or contain the spread of bird flu until cases skyrocketed and the damage was done, repeating the same mistakes we of COVID-19.
We take on all these costs to hold up an industry with billions in government subsidies paid for by people’s tax dollars, one that’s putting us on a collision course of antibiotic resistance and is responsible for between 10% and 20% of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the inevitable result of the meat, egg and dairy industries’ growth and lobby power and of the rising demand for meat over the past century.
Some would see us pour money into trying to develop a panacea management style that keeps farmed animals alive long enough to die on our schedule. Though presented as a proactive solution, this still doesn’t address the root cause. Instead, we could drastically cut our reliance on animal-based foods and eliminate the factory farming that creates these problems. We could use the funding that currently makes meat artificially cheap to build an agricultural system that’s actually sustainable, employing the same farmers who currently farm animals to grow foods that benefit us and the earth.
My fingers are crossed that this particular flu will subside. But it won’t be the last, and it won’t be the most deadly. We are fighting an uphill battle against evolution itself, eating our way to diseases that could eventually kill us. I just hope change spreads faster than new viral strains.
Changing your habits can be really tough, especially when you’re going it alone and especially when it comes to emotionally or culturally significant foods. Write to Livia about it or request (kind of random) recipes at [email protected]