I am worried about the bird flu caper. Here is some ammo to fight back: a USDA spreadsheet on 1188 farms that depopulated 100 million chickens, ducks and turkeys using a variety of cruel measures
$841 million paid for the culls up to last July--with over 50% more birds culled since then
The bird flu program has been run by cruel dolts. One of its effects is to normalize animal genocide, and to cull birds in particularly horrible and painful ways. Some methods being used are banned for culling livestock, but somehow birds were not included in the law for livestock.
It seems that the red lines against legalized killing just keep getting widened all the time. In Canada, you can now kill healthy adults whose only disorder is a mental health diagnosis (and those can be pinned on anyone—I am living proof of how the state tried to pin one on me) or you can kill a child.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9491605/maid-minors-canada-medically-assisted-dying-committee-report/
Here are the first and last pages of an APHIS USD spreadsheet with a list of 1.188 site where affected birds were identified, and nearly all were “depopulated.” I am struck by the euphemisms that are used to describe the methods by which the animals were killed. “Cervical dislocation” means their necks were broken. “VSD” stands for disruption of their ventilation supply until the animals slowly die from heatstroke:
https://www.hsvma.org/factsheet_ventilation_shutdown
Foam is used to suffocate the animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foam_depopulation
Here is the first section and last section of a very large spreadsheet listing all the locations where poultry have been found with any type of avian fu in the US between February 2022 and July 2024. Since then, at least 50 million more birds have been slaughtered in pursuit of an impossible goal, to stop the spread of avian flu, which is widespread in wild birds, most of whom do not get sick from it but can spread it to domestic flocks. Even when they never set foot outdoors, so it seems.
Does the USDA know what it is doing?
This is the KED, referred to on some of the lines. I had to look it up. It is the Koechner Euthanizing Device.
In Wales, the government published a report on the VSD slow kill method of cooking and suffocating birds.
The government advised that only under the direst of conditions should the VSD method be used.
As I said, there are laws on how animals must be humanely slaughtered, but they are not applied to poultry, which have their own law:
Why aren't poultry (chickens, turkeys, and ducks) protected under the HMSA?
USDA's Federal Register Notice "Treatment of Live Poultry Before Slaughter" states that the Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) (21 U.S.C. § 451 et seq. (2022)) ensures humane slaughter of the birds. The PPIA and its regulations require that live poultry be handled using good commercial practices and that they not die from anything other than slaughter after arriving at the slaughter facility. Since poultry are protected under the PPIA, they are not included under the HMSA.
But that law does not protect animals that will not be eaten, apparently:
The USDA seems to have found it more expeditious to simply approve cruel methods of slaughter, rather than reconsider whether its plan for dealing with bird flu might not be sensible, is tremendously expensive for the government and consumers, cannot wipe out the infection, and whether other ways to manage bird flu, like letting it pass through flocks, might make more sense.
Still, NO ONE (no human) has gotten bird flu from consuming affected chickens, eggs or milk, although we know such products have entered the food chain.
Can we now make our own decisions about the food we eat, and can the government give us honest information about what they know and don’t know?
Is the biosecurity mafia running government policy on bird flu?