Farmers must kill 4.2M chickens after bird flu hits Iowa egg farm | Hacker News Reader

Farmers must kill 4.2M chickens after bird flu hits Iowa egg farm

nbcnews.com

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If you only knew how many chicken are killed every day.

For eating, but also - are you aware what happens to the male chicken of the egg-laying breeds?

I think most people are at least vaguely aware of the scale of factory farming.

I think they go to some considerable effort to avoid as much awareness as possible.

I don't think that's true either. I think what's more likely is people just accept it.

They wont go to waste

They will grind them up and feed them to the cows and pigs for some extra protein.

Nice one!

Clever!

Cows will consume chicken? really?

Yes, turns out almost every creature on earth is an opportunistic carnivore. Dont ask me how they avoid botulism with their digestive system.

We already feed them plastic trash - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp0NSIrbu3Y

Isn't that how cows got infected with bird flu?

Wouldn't it get cooked to remove any bacteria/viruses first?

It was more a thing with the mad-cow disease. That spread by cows eating bone-meal from their own species. Infected by fungus.

As far as I know mad cow disease is a prion disease. Fungus has nothing to do with it, though I do believe the prions mostly collect in nerve tissue so feeding cows the waste meat from cows is a risk factor.

True! Prions not fungus.

Maybe it's time to finally ban battery cage farming?

What is the point of killing the animals?

Wouldn't it be better to quarantine them?

It's harder to quarantine when other animals that can get infected can fly. It can spread via dust too.

Animal farms of this size are effectively in a permanent state of quarantine anyway. Employees take chemical showers and change clothes to ingress and egress.

Anyway, it's probably cheaper to start from scratch. Quarantine would mean spending millions to keep chickens alive you couldn't sell or do anything with and hope the flu eventually spreads through the flock and no samples come back positive AND it doesn't spread the entire time.

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