Bird Flu Outbreaks and Factory Farms

The United States has a ghoulish problem with its farms and the consequences could be dire.

“Chicken and chorizo terrine with Jones’ Fruit Chutney — Jones The Grocer, Chadstone AUD10” by avlxyz is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Edit: Updated to reflect evolving crisis.

It’s perfectly natural to grind up chicken shit, feathers, and entire corpses, and feed them en masse to cows and pigs: at least, this is the prevailing wisdom of the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But this practice is coming home to roost with a vengeance.

The practice of grinding up animal corpses and excrement and feeding the resultant slurry to other animals has long been recognized as a significant problem. The 1980s-1990s fiasco in the United Kingdom, where feeding ground-up meat and bone-meal back to animals caused the deaths of almost 200 people from “mad cow disease” should have been warning enough. Unfortunately, feeding animals their own dead is profitable.

Now, the practice of feeding dead animals back to their kin is rearing its ugly head once again. H5N1, a deadly variant of influenza commonly referred to as “bird flu,” has been spreading in the United States, and one of its possible vectors is the innocently named practice of “poultry litter.”

Poultry litter is the practice of grinding up rotting chicken corpses, feathers, and poop, and turning it into a…