On a typical U.S. egg farm, where avian flu is thought to have originated, one employee cares for 250,000 hens, housed in as many as sixteen barns. The only "care" provided, beside giving feed, is removing "spent" hens to be euthanized and installing newly arrived birds from the hatchery.
"Some egg producers got rid of old hens by suffocating them in plastic bags or dumpsters, Temple Grandin, PhD, the famous animal scientist writes in a paper presented at the National Institute of Animal Agriculture. "When the egg producers asked me if I wanted cheap eggs I replied, 'Would you want to buy a shirt if it was $5 cheaper and made by child slaves?' Hens are not human but research clearly shows that they feel pain and can suffer."
Ken Klippen of the National Association of Egg Farmers disputes that the industry is cruel or that factory farming is behind the flu. "This is a flu for birds just as there is for people--and, as with people, some forms of the flu are worse than others," he wrote about a story I did for Food Consumer. Certainly, wildlife and people also get the flu but they are not crammed by the thousands over their own waste in windowless barns.
Public Money for Private Greed
There is something even more outrageous than crowding animals together to produce "cheap" meat and producing disease instead. The government uses our tax dollars to pay for it!
According to the Washington Pork Producers newsletter USDA forked over $26.2 million of our tax dollars to combat PEDv including "$11.1 million in cost-share funding for producers of infected herds to support biosecurity practices."
Here's a cheaper idea: how about giving them fresh air, room and no drugs?
Egg producers are also "compensated by the federal government for healthy birds destroyed to prevent the disease from spreading," for the current avian flu reports SC Times.
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