Photo

Here’s a brief look behind headlines from the Midwest about the scope of the poultry slaughter necessitated by the spread, since last December, of the H5N2 strain of bird flu.

You can keep track of the impact on chicken and turkey farms at an avian influenza web page maintained by the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. (The Poultry Site, an industry news site, is also tracking the latest developments.) [Insert, June 7: Here’s an excellent Times article on the implications for human health.]

The combined toll in chickens and turkeys is approaching 50 million dead or slaughtered birds.

Photo

That is a huge number. But gauge it against the scale of the mass-meat industry and it becomes more like a rounding error. Just one company, Tyson Foods (one of the biggest chicken vendors on the planet) processes 41,000,000 chickens a week.



I’m not a vegetarian, although my family has gotten much more focused in recent years on where meat comes from when we do eat chicken or, pretty rarely, beef or pork. The latter two we now try to get only through a local shop working with small farms in the region. Of course that choice comes at a higher cost.

Most poultry, beef, pork and the like comes from massive “farms” called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. (The acronym, a four-letter word to animal welfare campaigners, was creatively deconstructed by students in the environmental policy class I co-teach at Pace University.)

Photo

Last year, our Pace University student team focused on food policy and animal welfare asked a simple question: “Can CAFOs be Concentrated Animal ‘Friendly’ Operations?”

Alyssa Vilas Boas, one of the leaders of the student food team, initially presumed the answer was no. But she met Sam Simon, president of Hudson Valley Fresh, who convinced her that not all CAFOs are the same.

Unless consumers get more concerned about the conditions in the operations that provide our meat, it’s unlikely that the norms will shift toward those described by Simon.

The Animal Blawg, which explores animal welfare and the law, posted a piece by Seth Victor today making the point this way:

I’ll keep this short and sweet, because we’ve made this point on the blawg several dozen times. NPR reports that the recent outbreak of H5N2, or avian flu, has caused economic hardship for American farmers, to the point that the USDA is importing eggs from the Netherlands to meet demand. Although it is mentioned in the lead paragraph, the fact that nearly 50 million chickens and turkey have been slaughtered to stem the virus is played off like any other economic number. As you read the article, look at the wording: these animals have been “destroyed,” not “killed” or “slaughtered.” The rest of the article is about the business model and bottomline consequences. It might as well be about how many iPhones had to be recalled for defective touch screens. These aren’t living things, remember; their just animals, cogs in the machine. [Read the rest.]

Of course Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, as always, conveyed the issues with a superb mix of facts and black humor last month: