Farmers must kill 4.2M chickens after bird flu hits Iowa egg farm(nbcnews.com)

13 pointsby DocFeind2 anni fa16 comments

Farmers must kill 4.2M chickens after bird flu hits Iowa egg farm

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/farmers-must-kill-42m-chickens-bird-flu-hits-iowa-egg-farm-rcna154424

16 comments

If you only knew how many chicken are killed every day.

For eating, but also - are you aware what happens to the male chicken of the egg-laying breeds?

squigz2 anni fa

I think most people are at least vaguely aware of the scale of factory farming.

dTal2 anni fa

I think they go to some considerable effort to avoid as much awareness as possible.

squigz2 anni fa

I don't think that's true either. I think what's more likely is people just accept it.

reify2 anni fa

They wont go to waste

They will grind them up and feed them to the cows and pigs for some extra protein.

Nice one!

Clever!

b3ing2 anni fa

We already feed them plastic trash - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp0NSIrbu3Y

bhhaskin2 anni fa

Isn't that how cows got infected with bird flu?

fifilura2 anni fa

It was more a thing with the mad-cow disease. That spread by cows eating bone-meal from their own species. Infected by fungus.

Doxin2 anni fa

As far as I know mad cow disease is a prion disease. Fungus has nothing to do with it, though I do believe the prions mostly collect in nerve tissue so feeding cows the waste meat from cows is a risk factor.

fifilura2 anni fa

True! Prions not fungus.

free_bip2 anni fa

Wouldn't it get cooked to remove any bacteria/viruses first?

Sontho2 anni fa

Cows will consume chicken? really?

Log_out_2 anni fa

Yes, turns out almost every creature on earth is an opportunistic carnivore. Dont ask me how they avoid botulism with their digestive system.

lxgr2 anni fa

Maybe it's time to finally ban battery cage farming?

guilhas2 anni fa

What is the point of killing the animals?

Wouldn't it be better to quarantine them?

positr0n2 anni fa

It's harder to quarantine when other animals that can get infected can fly. It can spread via dust too.

Animal farms of this size are effectively in a permanent state of quarantine anyway. Employees take chemical showers and change clothes to ingress and egress.

Anyway, it's probably cheaper to start from scratch. Quarantine would mean spending millions to keep chickens alive you couldn't sell or do anything with and hope the flu eventually spreads through the flock and no samples come back positive AND it doesn't spread the entire time.