H5N1: Meanwhile - out in the real world…
By Charlie • February 27, 2006 • No comments yetIt’s been a long time coming, but finally the EU, the FAO, Governments everywhere in fact are admitting that the flu caused by the H5N1 virus is an endemic disease of the poultry industry - just as (ahem) a growing number of us have been saying for many months. Despite some truly lousy reporting in the media totally blaming migrating birds for spreading H5N1(supposedly migrating, for example, at times of the year when the supposed vectors were in post-breeding moult, or moulting to places or in directions they don’t actually go), the fact that the EU is currently hosting a meeting of VETS to discuss ways to halt the spread of “Poultry Flu” rather than migratory bird specialists speaks volumes about what the hysteria is really all about: the poultry industry stands to lose billions of dollars in worldwide sales (the French poultry industry, the latest to be hit by the virus, is worth a staggering 7bn euros ($8bn) a year for example) if H5N1 really gets a grip. The vets had better come up with something - ANYTHING - to bale them out because the industry itself certainly doesn’t seem ready to sort out its own in-house problems…
Well, perhaps I can help with a suggestion for the industrial barons responsible for creating the hot-house conditions for diseases like this one: take better care of the birds in your ‘care’ (in fact start treating them like birds rather than a product) and stop flouting agreements designed to prevent diseases from crossing international borders.
And here’s a thought for us birders too: next time you settle down to a roast chicken dinner, why not think about what the money you just paid in the supermarket for the lump of antibiotic-riddled flesh you’re about to eat is actually supporting - a vast, cruel industry that has steadfastly refused to admit that any blame whatsoever lies with them and has instead promulgated fear and distrust that is leading to the killing of wild birds around the world.
I’ve said many times on this blog that I’m not making a meat-eating vs vegetarian argument: this is about welfare and humanity. Cruelty vs care if you like. By happily buying ever-cheaper meat we are supporting the conditions that allow the spread of diseases like “Poultry Flu”. In fact your hard-earned dollars, pounds, euros etc etc also help support practices like this: “Nearly ten billion chickens and half a billion turkeys are hatched in the U.S. annually. These birds are typically crowded by the thousands into huge, factory-like warehouses where they can barely move. Each chicken is given less than half a square foot of space, while turkeys are each given less than three square feet. Shortly after hatching, both chickens and turkeys have the ends of their beaks cut off, and turkeys also have the ends of their toes clipped off. These mutilations are performed without anesthesia, ostensibly to reduce injuries that result when stressed birds are driven to fighting… After the shackled birds pass through the stunning tank, their throats are slashed, usually by a mechanical blade. Inevitably, the blade misses some birds, who may still be moving and struggling after improper stunning. Proceeding to the next station on the assembly line — the scalding tank — the birds are submerged in boiling hot water. Those missed by the killing blade are boiled alive. This occurs so commonly, affecting millions of birds every year, that the industry has a term for these birds: ‘redskins’.” http://www.factoryfarming.com/poultry.htm”. Still taste good to you?
Poultry sales worldwide are plummeting in the wake of H5N1 and the producers are seriously worried we’ll not want their hapless ‘products’ anymore. Will they clean up their acts? If it means more money in their pockets, perhaps they will - but they’ll only do it if WE vote with our wallets and stop buying poultry meat until they do.
Poultry Flu could actually end up helping chickens…quite an irony.
And just in case you think I’m alone in this, take a read of the excellent report below written by a well-respected NGO which is currently ‘doing the rounds’ (and which was written a good two years after my friend and colleague Dr Martin Williams wrote his excellent “Dead Ducks don’t Fly” essay):
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“Small-scale poultry farming and wild birds are being unfairly blamed for the bird flu crisis now affecting large parts of the world. A new report from GRAIN shows how the transnational poultry industry is the root of the problem and must be the focus of efforts to control the virus. [1] The spread of industrial poultry production and trade networks has created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses like the H5N1 strain of bird flu. Once inside densely populated factory farms, viruses can rapidly become lethal and amplify. Air thick with viral load from infected farms is carried for kilometres, while integrated trade networks spread the disease through many carriers: live birds, day-old-chicks, meat, feathers, hatching eggs, eggs, chicken manure and animal feed. [2] “Everyone is focused on migratory birds and backyard chickens as the problem,” says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN. “But they are not effective vectors of highly pathogenic bird flu. The virus kills them, but is unlikely to be spread by them.” For example, in Malaysia, the mortality rate from H5N1 among village chicken is only 5%, indicating that the virus has a hard time spreading among small scale chicken flocks. H5N1 outbreaks in Laos, which is surrounded by infected countries, have only occurred in the nation’s few factory farms, which are supplied by Thai hatcheries. The only cases of bird flu in backyard poultry, which account for over 90% of Laos’ production, occurred next to the factory farms. “The evidence we see over and over again, from the Netherlands in 2003 to Japan in 2004 to Egypt in 2006, is that lethal bird flu breaks out in large scale industrial chicken farms and then spreads,” Kuyek explains. The Nigerian outbreak earlier this year began at a single factory farm, owned by a Cabinet minister, distant from hotspots for migratory birds but known for importing unregulated hatchable eggs. In India, local authorities say that H5N1 emerged and spread from a factory farm owned by the country’s largest poultry company, Venkateshwara Hatcheries. A burning question is why governments and international agencies, like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, are doing nothing to investigate how the factory farms and their byproducts, such as animal feed and manure, spread the virus. Instead, they are using the crisis as an opportunity to further industrialise the poultry sector. Initiatives are multiplying to ban outdoor poultry, squeeze out small producers and restock farms with genetically-modified chickens. The web of complicity with an industry engaged in a string of denials and cover-ups seems complete. “Farmers are losing their livelihoods, native chickens are being wiped out and some experts say that we’re on the verge of a human pandemic that could kill millions of people,” Kuyek concludes. “When will governments realise that to protect poultry and people from bird flu, we need to protect them from the global poultry industry?” [1] The full briefing, “Fowl play: The poultry industry’s central role in the bird flu crisis”, is available at http://www.grain.org/go/birdflu. Spanish and French translations will be posted shortly. [2] Chicken faeces and bedding from poultry factory floors are common ingredients in animal feed.
For the full report go to http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=194. |
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