Posted on 04/30/2022 6:39:15 AM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal
Laborers worked for a month disposing of birds killed in a gruesomely inhumane manner. Then they found they too were disposable…
Labourers at the one of the world’s largest egg factories arrived at the plant in Rembrandt, Iowa, early one morning in March to discover they were about to work themselves out of a job.
As they gathered at the huge barns housing stacks of caged hens, the workers were told to forget about their usual routine of collecting eggs and feeding the birds. Overnight, the factory had begun slaughtering more than 5 million chickens using a gruesome killing method after detecting a single case of avian influenza. Even supervisors were assigned to the arduous task of dragging dead hens out of packed cages as Rembrandt Enterprises raced to contain the spread of the virus, amid the largest bird flu outbreak in the US in seven years.
The culling has been repeated at chicken and turkey farms across Iowa and 28 other states from Maine to Utah. More than 22m birds have been killed in an attempt to contain the outbreak – the majority in Iowa, the US’s biggest producer of eggs. The slaughter of 5.3m hens at Rembrandt is the largest culling at any factory farm in the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at strangesounds.org ...
Seems to me it’s more like the insanity is contagious.
All at the command of professional affirmative action government bureaucrats who never earned an honest dollar in their lives.
Most likely they were all illegals.
No problem, Biden won’t deport them and they’re eligible for every form of American welfare.
Outside criticism of Rembrandt has focused on the method of killing. Chicken farms have previously slaughtered hens en masse by suffocating them with foam or pumping barns full of carbon dioxide, methods that have been criticized as inhumane.But Tom Cullen of the Iowa newspaper the Storm Lake Times revealed that birds at Rembrandt were culled using a system known as ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+) in which air is closed off to the barns and heat pumped in until the temperature rises above 104F (40C).
“They cooked those birds alive,” said one of the Rembrandt workers involved in the culling.
An animal rights group, Animal Outlook, used freedom of information laws to obtain records of experiments at North Carolina State University that show that VSD+ causes “extreme suffering” to the hens as they “writhe, gasp, pant, stagger and even throw themselves against the walls of their confinement in a desperate attempt to escape.”
“Eventually the birds collapse and, finally, die from heat and suffocation,” the group said.
James Roth, director of the Center for Food Security and Public Health at Iowa state university’s college of veterinary medicine and an adviser to the federal government on biosecurity, acknowledged that VSD+ causes more suffering than other forms of culling, but said it is the most efficient means of containing the spread of bird flu because it is relatively swift.
“Nobody wants to see it used, but sometimes it is, as a last resort. The rationale is if the influenza virus spreads so fast that it’ll go through a poultry house really rapidly, all of those birds produce massive amounts of virus in the air. Then you have a big plume of virus coming from that house that spreads to other poultry houses. It’s critical to get the birds euthanised before that virus becomes a huge plume of virus to spread,” he said.
Roth said that the authorities appear to have learned important lessons from 2015, when a bird flu outbreak resulted in what the US agriculture department calls “the largest poultry health disaster in US history,” with the slaughter of about 50 million chickens and turkeys.
It is in the wild bird population now
Truly, Avian Influenza is a horrible disease scenario, and there is no control other than test and slaughter. More devastating emotionally for backyard flocks, but a dead bird is dead bird.
It does speak to the scales of commercial poultry production. Chickens weren’t meant to be raised in houses of thousands. And there is no herd/flock medical treatment to make it better.
Heritage, range fed cost more (not just cage free, but range fed. There is a huge difference.) but is one way as a consumer to alter the market.
The reason eggs are produced into large numbers of hens in confined spaces is simple. People buy the cheapest eggs.
The problem is avian flu there’s no guarantee a new population won’t get infected.
Yes, it’s a monoculture issue now that you mention it. Farmers have known about it since the corn blight of the ‘30s.
Chickens are not "Human".
It would be worthwhile granting tax breaks to people who grow backyard chickens, plant heirloom varieties of grains and vegetables or even engage in urban agriculture.
There is only one solution: Herd immunity.
Ever notice we don’t get outbreaks in the black plague any more? Well, we did get one in San Francisco’s “Chinatown”. But then, they were not from the European “herd” that survived it.
I wonder if the “free range, outdoor access” chickens, with a tiny porch attached to the factory shed, will now be enclosed entirely to prevent contact with wild bird carriers.
How do they test?
Let me guess, the “gold standard” PCR?
No, chickens are not human. Being a city boy, I've never killed a chicken but I've shot a few pheasants, and innumerable quail and dove in my time so close enough. They were tasty too, except for the doves I overcooked one time.
Anyway, to your point. Chickens aren't humans, but humans are human.
Nature is cruel, but when humans kill animals, humane is defined as swift and merciful. Any human who would sadistically kill animals would sadistically kill other humans.
The problem I see here is the monoculture issue, cramming thousands of hens into a single dormitory where they can all catch the same disease, all at pretty much the same time, creating a situation where it's necessary to suffocate several thousand birds to death en masse. "At least that's what the expert from State U said." Kinda like planting countless miles of city thoroughfares and thousands and thousands of houses built in the 50's with Dutch Elm trees. The pest it's vulnerable to gets spreaded to the entire population, everywhere, right now.
What's the solution to it? To be honest, I don't know. Pay more for chicken and eggs now, for sure.
There is an alternative. Let it run its course. Its not 100% deadly, and the birds that survive will hatch chicks that are more likely to survive.
Its now endemic the wild bird populations, they are not not completely dying out, but one by one they will keep infecting our flocks and then the government shows up and executes them all. Our flocks are going to die out.
We need to stop using PCR tests to find disease, and we need to stop using mass murder as a treatment.
The way the treat and kill chickens in a meat processing plant is pretty gruesome.
Eggxactly. They didn’t think slaughtering all their was was just fun and games and a means to a more profitable operation. Obviously they were told by some guvvys that they must do it, or else. Sounds like Wuhan virus part II to destroy food supplies and more of the economy.
Heritage, range fed cost more (not just cage free, but range fed. There is a huge difference.) but is one way as a consumer to alter the market.
People think there is an ideal/perfect way to grow food. They are the ones that complain with their mouths full.
Culling herds to stop disease spread is SOP and has been for a long time.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Canada was importing huge numbers of American horses for their westward expansion and homesteading the prairies. The husband of a great-great aunt ran a livery stable in Winnipeg which got infected by a horse disease called Glanders. Many stables had all of their horses put down as did many of the importers. The disease is transmissible to humans and my ancestor died from it.
I suppose we are lucky that Fauci and the Dems didn’t try to cull the human herd in 2020.
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