Eating Chickens May Cause The Next Pandemic

Bird flu is a huge concern in the US right now. The disease has infected over 100 million animals since 2022 including chickens, turkeys, and even cows. Fears over its potential to spread rapidly among humans are growing. This is obviously bad for humans but also presents a real crisis for the birds as well.

The US government requires that whenever bird flu is detected in an agricultural facility the whole flock of chickens must be killed. One facility in Weld County, Colorado recently detected the disease and as a result was required to kill 1.8 million chickens.

Facilities that kill their entire chicken flocks get compensated. The Department of Agriculture paid out half a billion dollars to facilities in 2023 to help them recover. However, chickens and other animals don’t get off so easily.

The options are slim to kill so many animals so quickly. One method is to spray firefighter foam on the chickens. When enough of it is layered over the chickens it becomes a sea of foam that the chickens cannot breath under. They slowly and painfully suffocate.

Other methods include piping carbon dioxide into the agriculture facility or shutting off the ventilation system allowing the heat to rise to such a level that the birds die.

Killing large quantities of birds after discovering the disease is not a guarantee against a possible pandemic. There’s still a chance that disease can get out into the community before the animals are culled. At the agricultural facility in Weld County, Colorado, six humans got infected with bird flu in the process of killing the birds, which is a new record for human infections in a single incident.

The fact is that bird flu and other viruses are always going to be a danger while animal agriculture exists. The extreme overcrowding of birds and other animals like cows and pigs makes agriculture facilities a perfect place for viruses to develop. Animals often getting sick from inhumane conditions does not help the problem.

Both animals and humans benefit from replacing animal agriculture with a more plant-based food system, which doesn’t carry the same risk of creating a new human virus. The world has seen what a deadly pandemic can do recently and avoiding another one should be at the top of its priorities along with ending mass systemic cruelty towards animals.