Category: Food and Drink

GRAIN just published a report on the recent bird flu outbreak in India.

In just three weeks after it was officially confirmed, 3.7 million birds had been killed. This comes out to an average of about 122 birds per minute for every minute of the day, day and night, seven days a week over this period. All this is made possible with modern technology like the super efficient AED-100, list price $600,000, which kills 10,000 birds per hour, by picking up the birds by their feet and dragging their heads through electrified water. This included not only birds on a few large factory poultry farms, but birds all over the region including small farm and backyard flocks. It was a devastating blow to the biodiversity of the area.

It seems like we don’t hear much about bird flu these days, but it’s still there and no less important than a few years ago. There are still many people dying each year from bird flu, and the risk is very real that soon there will be person to person transmission of the disease possibly causing a world wide pandemic.

Perhaps the reason we don’t hear much about it anymore is the politicians and large corporate interests profiting from the trade in factory farm birds knew the public wasn’t going to buy their stories anymore about the disease being caused by migratory birds and small flocks kept outdoors.

They knew if they kept telling this story, people would start pointing out that in fact what was happening was outbreaks in factory farms were infecting wild birds, in turn infecting small outdoor flocks. In fact, small outdoor flocks are the solution to the problem, not the cause. The small outdoor poultry holders don’t deserve to be the victims.

The reason there are outbreaks in factory poultry farms is the highly inbreed bird varieties used in these operations have a depressed immune system making them vulnerable to all sorts of infections. It was inevitable a virus like H5N1 bird flu would develop in the unsanitary and crowded conditions of modern factory farms. Bird varieties usually used in small outdoor flocks have normal immune systems.

It’s outrageous that large scale operations which are the source of the problem get massive government subsidies to cover their losses, as what happened with European poultry farmers during the last large outbreak in Europe, while small flock holders all over the world don’t get a penny and face legislation restricting their ability to continue raising birds.

The only option we have is to act as consumers and not buy factory farm poultry or poultry products! The definition of what is or isn’t factory farm is all but totally blurred now. It doesn’t matter if you buy ‘organic’, ‘free range’, ‘grass fed’, ‘grain fed’, ‘pasture raised’ or whatever else they call it. The legal definition of these terms has been so watered down as to not mean anything. It doesn’t matter if you buy these products in a supermarket or whole foods store. Any poultry product you buy will probably be a factory farm product, unless you have a personal knowledge of the farmer or unless you or a friend raised the birds yourself.