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.

    • starman2112
      2·
      1 year ago

      Because they aren’t right. People talk about overpopulation constantly. Overpopulation isn’t the problem, distribution is. We don’t need to grow animals to feed people in the first place; that turns plants into food less efficiently than just feeding the plants to people.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
      21·
      1 year ago

      You know how people who eat meat are uncomfortable about animal cruelty in farms and don’t like to think about it?

      It’s the same here with people who think animal lives are completely equivalent to human lives. This is the logical conclusion they don’t like to think about. If you had mass human death to correct for overpopulation, it would solve the food demand issue – and if mass human death is no different from mass animal death, then this would be the fewest deaths of living things to solve the issue.

      It’s a common thread in these comments. You see people blaming poor farmers for being poor, and not considering the higher prices for meat alternatives and vitamin supplements. Factory processed food is the cheapest, and vegan meals are as far from that as possible. People will beat around the misanthropy, but they won’t look it in the face like the population issue forces them to.

      • daltotron@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        It’s the same here with people who think animal lives are completely equivalent to human lives. This is the logical conclusion they don’t like to think about. If you had mass human death to correct for overpopulation, it would solve the food demand issue – and if mass human death is no different from mass animal death, then this would be the fewest deaths of living things to solve the issue.

        I don’t know if that really holds up. I don’t think we’re tapped out totally in ecological terms. I’m willing to be proven wrong on that (I kind of doubt I can, alternatives are kind of under-researched as a matter of principle), but if we’re not tapped out in ecological terms, then I think the main limitation on food demand would be the level of labor available for food production. i.e. more people can provide for more people. I kind of struggle to think of a scenario in which misanthropy, or, I guess lack of it, is the problem here, and not like. Mass industrialized production. I don’t wanna say capitalism is the problem cause that seems kind of tropey, and it isn’t really accurate, but it’s certainly not helping the issue, in any case.