The Great Chicken Coop, Part 2
Why Do We Kill 1 Million Chickens if One Tests Positive for Bird Flu?
Me with Clover on my shoulder from last July with a jackfruit hanging in the background.
A dark brown hen hatched four baby chicks yesterday, the first young ones I’ve seen in awhile. I wasn’t able to get a picture because the battery on my smart phone was drained by then. But I’m glad the chicken population seems to be stabilizing a bit. We had a long while where nothing hatched.
As some of you know I was having difficulties securing live chickens or chicks in Las Vegas a few months ago, as detailed here:
One person mentioned going to Tractor Supply Co. They do have chick days which start in late February and run through October. There are two locations in the Vegas Valley, both on the other side of town. And you can even supposedly order chickens in a box online. I’m not sure if the seeming shortage in live chickens to buy on Craigslist was a seasonal thing or something else. Somebody still has an ad up from yesterday for two roosters and three hens for $5 each or $20 for all of them. Wholesale egg prices are way down from their all time highs.
But this article by Joel Salatin on Brownstone was very thought provoking. Why do we kill so many animals for the supposed threat of bird flu? Isn’t there a better way?
As the nation suffers through yet another High Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) outbreak, questioning the orthodox narrative is more important than ever. At a time when people are screaming about overpopulation and the world’s inability to feed itself, surely we humans need to figure out how to reduce these kinds of losses.
Numbers change each day, but at the last count about 60 million chickens (mainly laying hens) and turkeys died in the last year. A bit more than a decade ago it was 50 million. Are these cycles inevitable? Are the experts funneling information to the public more trustworthy than those who controlled press releases during 2020’s covid outbreak?
If thinking people learned only one thing from the covid pandemic, it was that official government narratives are politically slanted and often untrue. In this latest HPAI outbreak, perhaps the most egregious departure from truth is the notion that the birds have died as a result of the disease and that euthanasia for survivors is the best and only option.
First, of the nearly 60 million claimed deaths, perhaps no more than a couple million have actually died from HPAI. The rest have been killed in a draconian sterilization protocol. Using the word euthanized rather than the more proper word exterminated clouds the actual story. Euthanizing refers to putting an animal out of its misery. In other words, it’s going to die and is in pain or an incurable condition.
Very few of the birds killed are in pain or even symptomatically sick. If one chicken in a house of a million tests positive for HPAI, the government brings full law enforcement force to the farm to guarantee all live birds die. Quickly.
The policy of mass extermination without regard to immunity, without even researching why some birds flourish while all around are dying, is insane. The most fundamental principles of animal husbandry and breeding demand that farmers select for healthy immune systems. We farmers have been doing that for millennia. We pick the most robust specimens as genetic material to propagate, whether it’s plants, animals, or microbes.
But in its wisdom, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA—Usduh) has no interest in selecting, protecting, and then propagating the healthy survivors. The policy is clear and simple: kill everything that ever contacted the diseased birds. The second part of the policy is also simple: find a vaccine to stop HPAI.
If a farmer wanted to save the survivors and run a test on his own to try to breed birds with HPAI immunity, gun-toting government agents prohibit him from doing so. The scorched earth policy is the only option even though it doesn’t seem to be working. In fact, the cycles are coming faster and seem to be affecting more birds. Someone ought to question the efficacy.
There is no questioning the efficacy, or even if programs that once worked might be creating diminished returns over time. Nor is there questioning if corruption might be laying the foundation for a vaccines are the only way ideology even if they threaten the entire food system and ecosystem in general. It’s getting to a point of suicidal levels of stupidity. So what does Joel Salatin suggest?
While I don’t want to sound flippant or above HPAI susceptibility, incident rates definitely indicate less vulnerability in well-managed pastured flocks. Creating an immune-building protocol surely merits research as much as overriding the immune system with vaccines and trying to stay ahead of disease mutations and adaptations with human cleverness. How about humbly seeking nature for solutions rather than relying on hubris?
The parallels between HPAI expert orthodoxy and covid orthodoxy are too numerous to mention. Fear porn is rampant in our culture. The HPAI worry feeds food worry, which makes people clamor for government security. People will accept just about anything if they’re afraid. Does anyone really think human cleverness is going to beat migratory ducks? Really? Think it through and then embrace a more natural remedy: well-managed decentralized pastured poultry with appropriate flock sizes.
That all makes sense to me. My paternal grandmother had her Master’s degree in Botany but considered herself an Orinthologist. She was very into birdwatching and I still have sheets of notes of various bird checklists from all over the United States and abroad. You can’t go scorched Earth without killing the Earth and all of its inhabitants. You can’t vaccinate your way out of all of this and eventually it has to be viewed as mass systemic poisoning at the very least to even try to do so. Especially since the science has been corrupted with money and politics so thoroughly.
It worked great for Marek’s disease with a leaky vaccine and all. Oh wait. It no longer matters if a vaccine fails and even causes outbreaks. We have to do it anyways. Now they’re coming with mRNA jabs for livestock, just to see what happens, I guess.
They’ve been teaching for a long time that there is no other option. It all starts with the school system. I enjoyed this thought provoking post by Dr. Toby Rogers:
He is writing about the Trolley Problem, a utilitarianism style question often posed in social sciences, regarding whether you have a moral duty to kill one person to save the lives of five others. The problem is, in the real world, how would you ever know that this is what you’ve actually done?
I have numerous criticisms of The Trolley Problem and in recent years others have taken it apart as well.
To begin with, the people debating this problem are not engineers, they are studying to become social scientists. They don’t know how trolleys or train tracks actually work. And yet suddenly they are just supposed to start pulling levers this way and that and killing workers because they know best!? No, stay in your lane Chad, no one wants you to start taking over the train system just because you took an Intro to Philosophy course at Harvard.
But that just reinforces my point which is that the real purpose of The Trolley Problem is to teach these young bougiecrats that they have a right to play God.
My second problem is that it presents us with a false choice — you either kill five people or kill one person — what’s it going to be, sport? This constrains creative problem solving. Did anyone ever think to perhaps yell out to the workers that a train is coming? Or wave to the driver about the dangers ahead? Students never think to ask whether there might be an option C where no one is killed (which is how trolley systems are supposed to work).
In one version of The Trolley Problem people are tied to the tracks.
Yet students are never permitted to ask why people are being tied to the tracks in the first place nor are they permitted to suggest that untying them might be a better option rather than running them over. The point of the lesson is that we just have to kill some people so we better get on with it. How very German.
In a particularly gruesome variation on The Trolley Problem students are asked whether they would push a fat person in front of the train (or throw a fat person off a bridge in another variation) to save five people. What the actual f*ck!? Again, could they possibly come up with a more worthless example!? It is doubtful that a single human body, no matter how large, would actually stop a train (buffalo did not stop them so it is unlikely that a human body would). Still no yelling to warn the workers up ahead? Still all-knowing about how the train system works just by virtue of birth? As you can see in the video above, most of the people debating this are America’s version of Brahmins who have won the genetic lottery. Why are they engaging in deranged fantasies about human sacrifice of fat people in an Intro to Philosophy course? How come the bougiecrats are not being asked to jump in front of the trains themselves if it’s such an effective way to save some lives?
The answer to all of these questions is that the real purpose of this thought experiment is to let the Brahmins experience the thrill of, and become addicted to, the idea of playing God.
When writing about the zombie apocalypse thriller the Last of Us:
The Fireflies were stuck in the false choice of The Trolley Problem — kill one or kill many. They could not conceive of any other possibilities. And Joel was saying no, there are principles and obligations that are higher than utilitarianism. A father’s obligation to a child in his care supersedes the interests of the state. FIND ANOTHER WAY.
Are there really no other ways of doing business? The way we’ve been doing things doesn’t seem to be leading to good places.
III. Takeaway — let’s overthrow the scourge of utilitarianism now during the Fauci/Gates Apocalypse so as to prevent the next one from happening
Whenever I read a government statement saying "we're considering doing this..." - I always interpret that as "we've been doing this for ages already, and will slowly begin to admit that." That's how I see the mRNA food supply contamination issue. I certainly won't be eating steaks imported from mRNA fanatics like Australia and New Zealand any longer.
It’s all in the frame and the lens. False choices based on a distorted perception of how nature works.
The wisdom of the Tao Te Ching:
39
In harmony with the Tao,
The sky is clear and spacious,
The earth is solid and full,
All creatures flourish together,
Content with the way they are,
Endlessly repeating themselves,
Endlessly renewed.
When man interferes with the Tao,
The sky becomes filthy,
The earth becomes depleted,
The equilibrium crumbles,
Creatures become extinct.
The Master views the parts with compassion,
Because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
But lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
As rugged and common as stone.