But the fight with bird flu isn’t over yet, and we may come out on the other side with healthier birds (and new menu options).

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Rats with wings

The humble pigeon, thought by many to be a pest, has much to offer us in this fight against bird flu. Pigeons were once revered as war heroes, used to carry messages during the world wars; the Dickin Medal, the highest possible decoration for valor in animals, has been given to 32 pigeons, beginning with Winkie the pigeon in 1942. Before that, we used pigeons for meat and eggs, and squab (juvenile pigeons) remain a delicacy in much of the world. Texts from Spain regarding raising pigeons for their meat date back as far as 60 A.D. 

But today, it’s the pigeons’ DNA that can help us. Pigeons have high numbers of interferon-stimulated genes (which signal to infected cells when a pathogen is present), giving them what researchers hypothesize is an inherent ability to prevent viruses from entering their cells and spreading. After being exposed to bird flu in a lab environment, pigeons showed a low immune response and had low levels of the virus in their bodies. In comparison, chickens and turkeys with the same exposure had high levels of the virus concentrated in their organs, particularly in the brain. 

Further studies have shown pigeons to be resistant and/or minimally susceptible to the virus. One hundred rock pigeons were tested for the virus during the 2022 outbreak; only two were positive. However, their deaths were not attributed to the virus.

Obviously, the poultry industry’s showing no signs of restructuring to push pigeon quesadillas or pigeon tenders as your weeknight dinner. Despite pigeons’ benefits in bird flu resistance, much of our industry is focused around the more traditional chicken and turkey. But for those in favor of pigeon, they claim to reap the benefits. 

Squab Producers of California, founded in 1943, is the largest squab producer in the US, producing more than 400,000 squab yearly. Although SPOC owns a commercial processing plant, the squab are raised in more than 600 different local farms that work together as a co-op, so that the birds don’t have to face the traditional factory farming environment.

The federation’s president, Dalton Rasmussen, notes that the birds produce better when they’re happier—so they try to give each bird a short but sweet life. The birds processed by SPOC spend their short time in small, locally owned farms, often with outdoor flight pens that allow older breeder birds a taste of the good life. “It’s one of the tastiest, tenderest meats that you can get,” says Rasmussen. “It used to be known as the meat of kings, because it was served to royalty all the way back to the Egyptian days.”

Prices for conventional chicken and turkey meat, as well as eggs, have suffered through the bird flu epidemic. In addition, fear associated with the virus has dampened consumers’ enthusiasm for poultry dinners. Tyson, one of the largest poultry producers in the US, reported slipping sales through 2023, leading to the closure of four of its plants. US poultry sales overall declined by 13 percent between 2022 and 2023. It’s hard to say whether it’s impacted squab farmers, with so few commercial farmers to reference, but, so far, there has yet to be a bird flu breakout at any US pigeon farming facility. In an uncertain time of H5N1, we may see more consumers trying pigeon. And with many neighborhoods restricting chicken ownership, maybe we’ll see backyard pigeon roosts gaining in popularity, too.

We can’t change Bird Flu. Can we change chickens?

There are some possible pigeon-less solutions in the works, such as gene editing. However, it’s a tricky business, and it rarely has a guaranteed payoff. 

Scout Thompson, a PhD student in biology at Western University, says the technology might not yet be sophisticated enough to prevent the spread of avian flu. “Even if [gene editing] could successfully eradicate the current strains of concern in domestic flocks, the virus could still persist in wild waterfowl and be reintroduced with mutations.” 

And, with the current state of bird flu infections, that possibility doesn’t seem unlikely. Many different species of waterfowl have already fallen victim, and experts are concerned that migratory patterns of waterfowl may cause seasonal surges in infection. Researchers have begun making progress with the CRISPR gene-editing technique, but we simply don’t yet know if this could result in long-term progress for the battle against H5N1. 

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Betting on biosecurity

Vaccines are always an option, but it’s not always possible to mass-vaccinate poultry on the scale that would be required on a factory farm; after a positive test, just one major poultry farm in Texas was forced to cull close to two million chickens. 

But for smaller flocks, vaccines can be a source of hope. “I think we should make it easier for very small flocks to purchase vaccinations, medications and other treatments for their birds,” says Saro Nortrup, an urban flock owner in Nebraska. “Most of these, such as [medication for] Marek’s disease, are very expensive with large dosage options and a very limited shelf life.” 

According to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, all of the UK’s native breeds of chickens, ducks and geese are under threat from bird flu. While bird flu losses that make the news typically number in the millions, Nortrup noted that any bird’s death can cause a cascade of damage. “If you have a rare breed, for example, the loss of your flock could have a serious impact on the genetic pool of an entire breed.”

Many American producers grew frustrated as it seemed to be an endless wait for bird flu vaccinations that weren’t coming; even now, many farms don’t have access to preventative vaccines. However, renewed interest has led to new developments and increased accessibility for these vaccines; scientists are working on a vaccine for humans, in the case of a potential pandemic if bird flu begins inter-human transmission.

We don’t have all the answers to bird flu yet. But, with so many partial solutions in the works, we’ll find a way to push forward—even if the poultry industry is never quite the same.

Correction: A previous version of this article referred to HPAI as H1N1. That has been corrected to H5N1. 

The post Rats With Wings, Vaccines, And New Breed—2024’s Solutions to the Bird Flu Crisis appeared first on Modern Farmer.

I’ve worked with birds in many different settings, which allowed me access to many different species. For the exotic birds, it ranged from rescued wild-caught African Greys who wanted nothing to do with me to aviaries full of friendly budgies and cockatiels clamoring for a little one-on-one affection. For domestic birds, such as poultry, I worked with total “mutt” chickens to Bourbon Red Turkeys to the coveted Ayam Cemani, a breed of chicken that is fully jet-black, inside and out. (No, I didn’t crack any open to check.) Aside from my own pet birds, I worked on a farm where I raised chickens, ducks, and turkeys, and I volunteered for years at an avian sanctuary primarily for exotic birds like parrots. Some of the exotics I’d worked with were abused, while some were treated like royalty. With the domestics, there was one sad consistency—nobody seemed willing to care about the birds as individuals, and some barely saw them as living creatures whatsoever.

Patrick Kuklinski.

Birds are some of our most underappreciated species. Despite America’s love for birding and bird feeding (it’s estimated that the US alone had over $3 million in sales of bird food and supplies through 2023), we often underestimate their importance both to humanity and to the natural world. In the wild, birds are often keystone species (animals that have a disproportionately large impact on their surrounding environments). By spreading seeds, controlling insect populations and providing prey for larger birds and mammals, birds contribute to their ecosystems. In addition, their sensitive nature means that decreases in bird populations can often be a warning sign for impending danger to other species.

Sometimes, it seems problems the agricultural industry faces could have been avoided by simply looking ahead. Bird flu is one such circumstance that has many gritting their teeth—especially the researchers who sounded the alarm in 2022, when the same strain of bird flu that devastated farmers in 2015 re-emerged. Now, in 2024, we’re still deep in the throes of a bird flu pandemic (so far, mostly contained to animals)—and we have no signs that infections will slow. From January 2022 to June 2024, the USDA found 96.5 million infected birds—and there’s more to come. With so many years of research, loss of animals and stress to the public, one might expect that we would be closer to solving the bird flu crisis, but we’re lagging on actionable answers.

Photography via Shutterstock/IWall

A problem of our own making

Sadly, as it stands today, bird flu isn’t being handled humanely, which should be our bare minimum for epidemics like this. A common method is ventilation shutdown, which is exactly what it sounds like. The ventilation of an enclosure is shut off until the birds die “naturally.” Ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+) is a method where ventilation shutdown is combined with additional heat or gas in attempts to make the process more efficient; there’s no doubt that the birds subjected to this method still suffer excruciatingly. 

According to Ben Williamson, director of Compassion in World Farming, the leading methods of euthanasia for infected birds is “ventilation shutdown, which involves killing birds by an excruciating combination of asphyxiation and heatstroke, is inhumane, contrary to WOAH (World Organisation for Animal Health) standards and should be banned.”

According to the Animal Welfare Institute, about 77 percent of birds infected with bird flu, or 44.9 million birds, were killed via ventilation shutdown from February 2022 to March 2023. In these situations, the WOAH recommends the use of inert gasses, such as nitrogen or carbon dioxide, to be pumped into enclosures, which is a more humane method of slaughter. 

AWI’s analysis of USDA records indicates that operations with large flocks (at least 100,000 birds) were much more likely to employ VSD+ as a mass-killing method. Even with the widespread use of VSD+ in such situations, however, the USDA’s depopulation timeline was not met in a majority of cases. Of the 37 large flock depopulation events that involved VSD+ during a 16-month timespan between 2022 and 2023, nearly two-thirds took at least three days to complete. That’s far from a humane end for birds who were already potentially infected and suffering. In the most extreme cases, in which at least one million birds were involved, depopulation took more than two weeks. 

The USDA has requested that organizations only deploy VSD+ as a last-resort method of culling—and yet, in cases of such large populations of birds, humane options are rarely efficient, and so they are ignored. In addition, turning the ventilation off within a farm is essentially a free method of euthanasia, even if it’s slow and painful. More humane methods are associated with costs for which farms might not want to foot the bill. Chickens are already one of the least protected species when it comes to slaughter. They are exempt from the Humane Methods Of Slaughter Act, largely due to industry lobbying, and are instead given a provision in the 2005 Treatment of Live Poultry Before Slaughter notice by the USDA that they should be handled and slaughtered in a way that “is consistent with good commercial practices.” What this means, however, is not clearly defined. 

No easy way forward

Despite factory farms supplying the majority of the world’s poultry supply, growing concerns are also mounting over their inability to efficiently manage or stop the spread of disease. As of 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 164,099 registered poultry farms in the US, and the majority of them are factory farms.  According to analysis by the Sentience Institute, 99.9 percent of America’s broiler chickens live on factory farms, only slightly higher than 99.8 percent of America’s turkeys. 

“Factory farms create the ideal conditions for the spread of the disease, as they give viruses a constant supply of genetically similar hosts in close proximity to each other—allowing infections to spread rapidly—and for highly harmful new strains to emerge,” says Williamson. “Most worrying of all, keeping large numbers of immune-suppressed birds in close proximity also increases the risk of viruses mutating, perhaps with the risk of evolving into new more pathogenic strains, which can then multiply and spread.” Not only are factory farms a breeding ground for diseases, but stress suppresses the immune system in poultry, and there’s data showing that poultry in factory farms are indeed stressed. Many environmental factors that we’d find unpleasant—heat, crowding, light, noise—all negatively impact chickens, too.  

Photography via Shutterstock

“When a farm has hundreds of thousands of birds per shed (or tens of thousands of birds per shed in some cage-free systems), rapid disease spread is unavoidable. What’s more, on a policy level, the government and farms are not treating these outbreaks as something that can be mitigated within a farm—if disease is detected, the entire flock is killed,” says karol orzechowski, from Faunalytics, an organization that collects data and research to improve animal welfare. “In this framework, mitigating disease within a farm becomes a moot point.” While there is no cure for HPAI in chickens, there’s no efficient way to test large flocks, meaning uninfected birds are culled along with their infected shedmates. 

There’s no easy answer here. There are plenty of expedient ways to cull chickens without prolonged suffering—cervical dislocation by hand, throat slitting, individualized gassing—that produce much less suffering. But these methods take additional time and money, leading many corporations to opt for the easier method, regardless of  the torment the animals endure.

The Better Chicken Initiative, headed by Compassion in World Farming USA, is a program intended to improve the lives of chickens in factory farms, as well as breed healthier chickens that produce better-quality meat for consumers. Launched in 2014, the organization estimates that with corporate partnerships through the program, the conditions and lives for over 100 million chickens have been improved. Meanwhile, some farms are taking matters into their own hands, such as Kipster, a Dutch egg farm (that has just opened its first US location), prioritizing humane conditions and carbon-neutral farming. 

Whether or not we’re ready to accept it, there’s probably one answer that’s far more humane than any proposed alternatives to bird flu—restructuring not only how factory farms operate but how we treat farmed poultry. Until we have conditions for farmed birds that don’t actively promote the spread of illness, we’ll have to keep fighting. We may not see immediate solutions to the bird flu crisis, but strengthening our animal welfare practices now will help animals and consumers for generations to come.

The post Opinion: Bird Flu is a Problem. The Way We Deal With it is Cruel appeared first on Modern Farmer.