The US is normalizing the cruelest mass killing method to stop bird flu
The US is normalizing the cruelest mass killing method to stop bird flu
Bird flu is surging again. We failed to prepare, and now animals are paying the price.
Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.
Just pump nitrogen in the sealed pens. The animal doesn’t panic due to perceived oxygen deprivation. They just get sleepy and die.
Hell it would be the way I’d want to go if I was sick with terminal cancer. Cheap, easy, and painless.
I imagine that would be pretty difficult to do in a chicken coop. These are barns made out of corrugated steel and generally aren't even remotely air tight. You will, ultimately, need about 10x the nitrogen you would otherwise need, and that's if it even works.
So a special coop would need to be built for this purpose.
Chicken farmers are some of the poorest farmers in the country. They generally don't have the means to build a special kill shed to humanely euthanize their flock. They barely have the means to keep up with Tyson and Perdue's ridiculous bullshit.
So, while I agree, heat stroke is a fucking awful way to kill these animals, the issue isn't just "there's a humane method bro, just build a kill house bro"
The issue is, we are paying FAR too little for chicken, and most meat, honestly.
You’re not wrong and nuance is often the bane of rationality. I didn’t say it was an easy solution just a more humane one.
Doesn't sound as cheap as running the heater for a few hours.
Think of the power/gas savings!
Carbon monoxide would be cheaper. We used it for euthanizing animals that couldn't be saved at the wildlife rehab center I worked at. Though, it was done with sealed induction box, not a drafty barn like someone mentioned
Nitrogen is expensive and these buildings aren't airtight
These are engineering problems. The point is it’s way more humane than dying in a sweat lodge.
Eh, the atmosphere is 70% nitrogen, making liquid nitrogen is basically just a suped up AC.
There are also various methods of simply filtering the nitrogen out of the air. Having on site machines doesn't seem too bad.
Those big coops are not anything close to airtight. Heat, however, doesn't require it to be airtight.
wouldnt that be more expensive than just cutting off the ventilation? on top of paying for disposal afterwards & whatnot?
Disposal of what? The air we breathe is 75% nitrogen. The chickens are already going to have be disposed of.
Or... and this is crazy... not kill them?
This is specifically talking about mitigation for highly pathogenic avian influenza. HPAI kills chickens fairly quickly, so to contain the spread and minimize the risk of zoonotic spread to people, they kill every bird on every property that it's detected on.
This is one of those situations where no one thinks it's a great solution, it's just a pragmatic one that minimizes the risk towards workers while quickly depopulating the barn. The problem is that this is one of the cheapest and least humane ways to depopulate a barn, and shouldn't be allowed. We should insist that barns allow humane depopulation, or at least less inhumane methods.
We really need some humanitarian regulation in this country.
That would mean less profits for the people that run the country.
You can hope for that or you can become vegan today to no longer contribute to those industries.
I already eat very little meat just through personal preference. I think that is a reasonable way to go for the average person. Not everybody has to be vegan; they just need to consume a small amount of meat if they're going to consume it at all.
Hello aliens I'm a vegan and condemn this bullshit
I'm not and I condemn this bullshit.
If humans don't commit suicide first through war or environmental abuse, I truly believe that future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake. They'll tell stories about how we caused epidemics and pandemics, wasted valuable resources and land, polluted air, land, and sea, and abided the suffering of billions of animals, all so we could feed our children dinosaur shaped meat nuggets and buy cheap hamburgers that we were too lazy to even get out of our cars to purchase.
"And then, even as global warming spiraled out of control, they wasted arable land and dwindling water supplies on subsidized corn to feed to the subsidized beef and poultry stock. The ones that didn't get culled or recalled or spoil before even hitting a plate contributed to a dietary culture of heart disease. Also, the animals regularly suffered immensely, which they were aware of but preferred not to consider."
future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake
Primates, including humans, evolved to be omnivorous. In the 200,000 year history of the homo sapiens species, only the most recent 3% have had the benefit of agriculture. Even then, only 0.1% have had the benefit of the industrial revolution which could in theory provide enough calories and nutrients for all humans with a purely herbivorous diet.
So what? We evolved to thrive on a wide variety of diets. I don't judge my homo erectus ancestors for doing what they needed to survive. It's fairly apparent that the person you're replying to is referring to modern society's obsession with producing as much meat as we do, not the concept of eating meat as a whole.
The thing about civilization is that ideally it advances. If 200k years is the sample size you wish to view, houses are fairly new. Plumbing is newer than houses. Insulation even more new. Fire safety and building regulations even more new still. Asbestos was new, and now it's old. This is progress. To keep with this analogy, in my opinion meat will become the asbestos, the lead paint, or the knob and tube wiring, of food.
That has nothing to do with what they said.
dinosaur shaped meat nuggets
You can get your animal nuggies animal free if interested. https://impossiblefoods.com/products/chicken/nuggets/wild-nuggies
I've had those. They're essentially indistinguishable from regular chicken nuggets.
Because of course they are, the bar is not very high for dino nuggies.
Go vegan everyone, stand on the right side of history
Yup. And there are gonna be arguments about how "they were a product of their time," which will be exactly as bullshit as it is today when we talk about people of the past.
The thing we can't say is that we didn't know better.
The meat industry is fucking sick and demented but people need their meats so animal ethics be damned…. Fucking bullshit, fucking human cancer
Take the subsidies from animal farming and give them to meat alternatives.
We will be awash in lentils!
You'd better get all your meat free-range or hunt it yourself.
Um, just not eating meat is a fairly straightforward option...
I dunno why so many people discount hunting as a good alternative to sourcing your own meat.
Sometimes the whitetail deer populations are fucking insanely out of control because we killed off their predators like 100 years ago in some areas, and similar things happen all over because predators require larger ranges and are less able to integrate with human developments. Sort of like how we have a shit ton of crows and rats and pidgeons, and raccoons. I think it would probably make more sense to source meat from doing your part to clamp down on the populations, than the alternatives, which are predator reintroduction, which isn't always guaranteed to work and comes with complications, as the native species are usually totally extinct, or just like. ecological collapse from overgrazing, which sucks and is bad.
This is why the core of the issue that nobody ever talks about is human overpopulation. The demented levels of factory farming we have is only a thing because 8 billion people need to be fed.
The demented level of factory farming had nothing to do with human overpopulation, but everything to do with human culture's demand for animal products that are entirely unnecessary for survival. If we change our culture to eliminate animal products, we will eliminate a huge source of wasted resources and labor. Think of how much less plant agriculture would be required if we didn't have to feed 33 billion chickens, almost two billion sheep, a billion and a half cattle, a billion pigs.
If we just grew food we can eat, instead of wasting land, effort, and resources both directly and indirectly supporting animal agra, we wouldn't have such huge problems.
"But baaaaaaconnnnnn." "I can't liiiiiive without eeeeegggggs." "Cheeseburgers taaaaaaaste too good give up" "it's because there's too many huuuuuumanssss"
Animal agriculture is very inefficient, because of tropic levels.
Looking on Wikipedia, dressed broiler chicken carcasses have a feed conversion ratio of about 4. That is to say, a 4lb whole chicken you buy from the butchers case would have required about 12 lbs of feed over its ~2 month life.
An online calorie counter says 4lb of raw whole chicken is 3856 calories. By contrast, a 1lb bag of cornmeal has ~3300 calories. 12 lbs of cornmeal have just over 10x the calories of 1 chicken.
Even comparing the differences in yield between chickpeas and corn, we get way more calories per acre from hummus than Buffalo wings.
In the US, we get 36% of our calories from animals, but use an order of magnitude more space to raise them. We grow more acreage of feed crops than crops that get directly eaten by humans. Fully 40% of the continental US is devoted to raising livestock, which is insane.
We don't factory farm because there's 8 billion humans to feed. We factory farm because we want "a chicken in every pot".
”The problem that nobody ever talks about is overpopulation"
Outright untrue, in both ways. People always talk about it, and it remains not the problem. The problem is distribution, which is largely due to greed and overconsumption. The problem is that farmers breed what they can sell, and people buy so much meat just to have access to it in case they want it eventually.
I found a third way it's incorrect: we don't need animal farms to feed people in the first place. We could simply eat plants instead of feeding them to animals.
Getting downvoted but you are right.
Pretty much all of modern problems can be traced to overpopulation.
Oh cool, that's completely horrifying. And not at all surprising from the meat industry. They've never cared about animal cruelty with anything else they do, so why would they care about this?
As an industry they necessitate not caring about cruelty, so anything they do isn't surprising
hi frick
If aliens do come to earth, and simply enslave us, torture us then kill us for reasons we can't comprehend, there should be absolutely no question whether we deserve it or not. They would be doing what we do to other sentient creatures en masse. We have the intelligence and ability to simply not kill these animals in a fashion that is sadistic and agonizing(im not even saying not to kill them, just do it humanely, bare minimum), yet we do it anyway because of greed and capitalist profit motives, cutting costs, etc.
Yes please. End this horrorshow
I like veganism because it forces meat-eaters to eat their own shit and perform mental gymnastics that make them worthy of an Olympic gold medal to avoid admitting their contribution to the problem.
Really shows the cognitive dissonance among average people. And they're proud of it, lol.
Eat shit, die, get in my belly!
They would be doing what we do to other sentient creatures en masse.
Chickens are sentient?
I see this sentiment a lot regarding eating meat. I think a lot of people don't realize how much these animals suffer.
Just look at your dog anytime you eat pork. Remember that that animal you're eating is smarter than your dog. That pig used to play with its siblings, have love for its mother, and eventually live in complete terror before it is killed. People love to make fun of Asian societies for eating dogs when it is exactly the same as eating a pig.
That little bit of joy you gained from eating pork came at the cost of unfathomable suffering.
There is no excuse in 2023, I've been building muscle for the first time in my life and doing it on a vegetarian diet.You know when people say "there's no such thing as a stupid question"?
I sometimes hope for aliens to come to this planet and treat us like we treat other living beings.
Humanity is such a poor excuse for civilisation
Humans are fucking disgusting. If you zoom out far enough we are just a bacterial infection of the Earth. Spreading our gray cities like bacteria in a petri dish. Growth for the sake of growth is the mentality of a cancer cell.
maybe one of the big filters for intelligent life in the universe is greed
The ferengi agree.
I'm looking forward to alien's selectively breeding us for pets like we do dogs.
It would be a trip to see how many dwarf albinos end up running around
Firefighting foam is full of PFAS that tends to pollute groundwater. The last thing we need is more uses for it.
Heaven forbid you actually vaccinate your livestock.There isn't really a vaccine. One is being trialed but it is not available. The reason they are so extreme with this is that in affected birds they have about a 99% chance of dieing within 48 hours of infection. Waterfowl can carry it for longer but are still susceptible to death, they seem to be the major infection vector. HPAI highly contagious (highly pathonogenic avian influenza is the name), a bird brushing up on another is enough to spread it, due to birds cleaning their feathers with their mouths. So if a poultry farm tests positive they want to quarantine it ASAP so a sparrow doesn't spread it to neighbors and wild populations.
Today I learned. Here’s hoping they have a vaccine soon.
And, setting up an entire culling operation, which would have to include transporting the birds, and contaminating another facility and several semi trailers, and staff, not to mention other wildlife is a huge risk. Shutting the windows and turning up the heat is probably the safest and quickest way to do things in this situation
Truly heartbreaking... No words💔
Culling animals is never compassionate, but it must be done.
They could have just not made the chickens in the first place
Then it wouldn't need to be done
Gawd. That doesn't make a lick of sense