US egg factory roasts alive 5.3M chickens in avian flu cull | Hacker News Reader

US egg factory roasts alive 5.3M chickens in avian flu cull

theguardian.com

34 pointsNoRagrets19 comments

This is a strange case of outrage culture fake news.

A story of where they used an industry standard practice to deal with a deadly contagious disease that cannot be eradicated once discovered in a flock, the story author did not prove what was claimed to be witnessed ("writhe, gasp, pant, stagger and even throw themselves against the walls of their confinement in a desperate attempt to escape") since they did not provide video, and the entire thing is written in a way to evoke an emotional reaction...

... wrapped around a completely buried story that corporate mismanagement will result in the loss of jobs for several hundred people during a pandemic and one of the worst economies our country has had in a while (all time high corporate earnings, all time high cost of living, all time high wage stagnation).

And I've noticed a lot of people bring up nitrogen poisoning as an option over CO2: birds aren't like us, and if this really is a superior method then all of you should convert your outrage into pushing Congress to regulate this industry further and outlaw CO2 suffocation as a way to eliminate a flock.

I'm sadly unsurprised at the barbarism of how they killed them.

Iowa is one of multiple states in the USA that makes it a crime for employees to film animal torture or abuse in such facilities. The status-quo of how beef, pork and poultry are produced in America is horrific (in terms of sanitation, animal suffering and worker exploitation) and rather than do anything to improve it, we treat whistleblowers like terrorists and make even publicizing the abuses into felonies.

The goal is not avoiding chicken cruelty, is stopping a outbreak virus and saving millions of domestic birds and wildlife. They were obliged by law to do it, want it or not, and is for yesterday. And you need to sterilize the enclosures also.

We talk about extreme measures but we shouldn't ignore that the problem was also extremely difficult to address.

I'm more than open to discusse any ideas about how to do this task while making happy also the cruelty animal crew.

> The goal is not avoiding chicken cruelty, is stopping a outbreak virus and saving millions of domestic birds and wildlife.

People are not automatons who must follow a single goal at the expense of all other considerations.

> I'm more than open to discusse any ideas about how to do this task while making happy also the cruelty animal crew.

Yeah, you’re totally operating in good faith.

The answer is nitrogen poisoning by the way.

> Yeah, you’re totally operating in good faith.

This does not matter. This is about providing solutions not about "I'm holier than thou" or virtue signaling. I could be Mr. Eggman and they would still have exactly the same problem to solve.

Nitrogen is odorless, so accumulating in the coops would be dangerous for workers. Buying it in large amounts could be also problematic and expensive.

I'm pretty sure the owners wouldn't have sacrificed 5.3M chickens in profit if they had seen any other way. Also, I find it odd that the Guardian apparently did not wait for them to reply before publishing the story. If they had waited any significant amount of time, they probably would have gone with something else than: "Rembrandt Enterprises has been approached for comment"

Killing the chickens was required of them by the government (as it has over here in Europe for several locations, for the same reason). But they decided to do it in the cheapest way possible, because shutting down the environmental control costs nothing as opposed to hiring an external provider to do it in a more animal friendly way. They could have made a more animal friendly but less profitable choice.

I think the slightly more animal friendly way is to pump the building full of CO or CO2.

Dying from CO2 inhalation is painful although CO inhalation is less so. Nitrogen inhalation is entirely pain free. Although I'm sure it's more expensive since CO and CO2 can easily be produced with common materials.

Chickens aren't humans. The CO2 asphyxiation response seems to very across species. For example, this agricultural guide claims that chickens lose consciousness before reaching the response phases that we would consider painful:

> While rats do not lose consciousness prior to aversive responses to CO2, chickens become unconscious very quickly in high concentrations of CO2 and somatosensory neuronal potentials are not evoked until several seconds after the birds are unconscious.

> ...

> Webster and Fletcher (2004) reported that while White Leghorn chickens could detect atmospheres enriched with CO2 at 30, 45, and 60% in air, there were no differences in behaviors associated with the various atmospheres. They concluded that most hens, given modest motivation, were not sufficiently deterred from entering any of the CO2-enriched atmospheres. ...

Source: https://animalcare.illinois.edu/standards/co2-euthanasia-pou...

I feel like most of the reasonable outrage is on how the chickens were culled and the treatment of the workers. If pumping the barn full of CO2 is an option, why not use nitrogen instead? Painless death whereas CO2 causes pain. Giving thousands of chickens deadly heatstroke seems inhumane as well. 104F isn't going to kill a virus so it's just going to cause pain like heatstroke in humans. Its unfortunate that they had to kill so many birds but it seems entirely necessary given the risks of avian flu. As for the workers, culling a significant number of your livestock is going to mean there will be a significant number of workers no longer needed although I'm sure this will be temporary until the facility is back to normal capacity. The state government needs to make sure that these workers can receive unemployment payments until they can find new work or their jobs reopen since laying off that many people at one rural location is going to have significant impact on the community.

I don't have a citation for you because I heard this from someone I met in university, but large farms take "bio-security" incredibly seriously. Trying to treat the livestock is far more expensive than simply culling them all and sterilizing the enclosure. Additionally, even if they tried to treat the flock instead of culling it, the disease would linger in the population and be a continual concern.

I usually buy the cage free, free range, ethical eggs. They are often better tasting anyways and although they are expensive, they still are cheaper sources of quality protein than anything else.

I've noticed that the price of battery hen eggs are starting to come up to nearly 50% of the cage free variety with very little change in the price of the ethical-ish eggs. I wonder how much of that is because battery and barn hens are way more likely to have problems like this.

Similar for meat, I try to eat less of it and everything we buy is biologically produced. The price difference is decreasing compared to just 2 years ago. Maybe it's a combination of increasing cost on the non-bio side of things and increasing demand/volume of these kinds of alternatives?

Get ready for the egg prices to go up now, something similar happened in my country and now we are paying triple. What's going on with food production?

asymmetrical warfare

I'd call it wartime profiteering in businesses where profits/prices are raised without something like this happening.

At least with this we have a sane reason (if executed inhumanely imho).

All these other price hikes are just fucking ridiculous, using first the pandemic and now 'war' as their reason.

I mean, our agricultural system was highly dependent on fertilizer from Russia. I don't think that it's all price gouging right?

and then promptly fired the 250 workers that had to perform the task. I can't help but to not care too much about the chickens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com