No More Chicken Run
August 28, 2005
This article was published in the Wall Street Journal, Europe
Factory farming is healthier: for animals and people. That’s the take-home message as Dutch health authorities this week ordered free-range poultry farmers to bring inside their five million outdoor birds. There the birds will be less vulnerable to catching or spreading the deadly avian flu virus that’s made its way from Southeast Asia to the doorstep of European Russia in recent weeks.
German health authorities are considering their own ban on outdoor birds, over the objections of their country’s organic, free-range poultry farmers. Thomas Dosch, head of Bioland, Germany’s largest organic organization, said that “exceptions are needed from the order,” such as allowing birds to use
open-air pens covered by netting. Unfortunately, such netting will not protect the flocks from the wild-bird droppings that spread the disease. Organic farmers are obviously more concerned with their market premiums than public and poultry health.
Southeast Asia has been the origin of all pandemic flu strains and the less deadly annual flu varieties. The new H5N1 flu strain has killed more than 60 people in Asia and destroyed Asia’s poultry industry. Why? Free-range farming.
Asia is full of the small, “mixed” farms promoted by organic farmers, environmentalists and animal-welfare activists. Alternative-farming Web sites give endless testimony on the benefits of allowing free-range birds to live their “inner chicken,” so to speak.
It’s all a load of manure. The best reason to raise poultry and animals indoors is to prevent massive epidemics that would kill millions of people and farm creatures. The same flu virus that infects people also infects pigs, poultry, wild birds—even whales. The more species swap viruses with each other and people, the greater the potential for a deadly, highly infectious human strain to evolve.
Global Asian influenza pandemics in 1957 and ‘68 each killed roughly a million people. The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic killed 20 million to 40 million. An equivalent death toll for today would be over 100 million, which the World Health Organization says is possible if avian flu evolves into a strain capable of being passed between humans.
Vaccinating people helps, but it’s hardly a solution. Vaccines always lag behind viruses because they take months and millions of fertilized chicken eggs to prepare. Meanwhile, the flu viruses continue to change, compromising the vaccines.
That’s why experts now focus on the root of the problem: traditional Asian farms raising the whole song load of Old McDonald’s animals in the same open barnyard. For months, the WHO has been lobbying Asian governments to gear up for a radical shift of pig and poultry farms to the modern confinement model so hated by the activists.
Activists claim it’s unethical to keep animals indoors. But last November, an EU panel found that banning cages for laying hens would significantly reduce animal welfare due to disease, parasites and cannibalism. Our family’s dozen free-range chickens prefer the protection of the barn rafters to the hawk hazards outside. Besides, it is hardly animal welfare when flu outbreaks require the euthanasia of tens of millions of birds or pigs.
To lower the risk of a deadly pandemic, Asian authorities are instituting several immediate steps: First, they have shut down the traditional live poultry markets in the major cities—a brewing virus-swapping cauldron. Second, they are encouraging farmers to confine their animals and to separate them by species. Ducks are being emphasized because of their interaction with wild waterfowl and because they are silent carriers of the flu virus.
Thailand has approved a vaccination program to inoculate free-range chickens, ducks and other birds. But Thai officials see no need to inoculate poultry raised in confinement because these farms have already applied extensive preventive measures and the lack of interaction with wild birds.
Raising poultry in confinement also makes our food directly safer. Research in the U.K. and Denmark has shown that free-range poultry is three times more likely to be contaminated by salmonella and campylobacter bacteria—two of the most common illness-causing, food-borne bacteria. Why? They’re exposed to far more of these pathogens from wild bird droppings.
For years we’ve been told by so-called “experts” that free-range is better and healthier. Now we know better. If Old McDonald were alive today, he’d raise his chickens indoors.
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