Hong Kong authorities announced Wednesday that they planned to kill all chickens in the territory's retail markets because of fears of a dangerous bird-flu outbreak. Health officials said they detected the deadly H5N1 virus last week in chickens at a stall in the Kowloon area and slaughtered about 2,700 animals in that neighborhood to prevent its spread. But more cases were uncovered this week at four markets in the New Territories and Hong Kong island, leading to the order to get rid of all remaining live chickens in retail markets, stalls and stores.
South Korea will cull over half a million fowl in a bid to prevent the spread of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, having already killed 150,000 chickens...
*** Cull: euphemism for murder.
They plan to slaughter a total of 236,000 poultry, as well as an unspecified number of other animals, including pigs, and all dogs and cats in the area by Thursday, the ministry said. About 6 million eggs also will be destroyed, it said.
Slaughtering cats and dogs near an area infected with bird flu would be highly unusual in Asia. Indonesia has killed pigs in the past, but most countries concentrate solely on destroying poultry. However, it would not be the first time for South Korea to kill cats and dogs due bird flu concerns. An official at the Agriculture Ministry said South Korea had slaughtered cats and dogs along with 5.3 million birds during the last known outbreak of bird flu in 2003.
Saudi Arabia said Tuesday it had killed some 158,000 chickens after the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain was found at an infected farm.
It's hard to believe how many nonhumans are being killed because of this - just look at those numbers - and that's a fraction of what is happening.
The virus is excreted in bird feces. It can be spread by bedding, straw, cages, feathers and other contaminated objects. The virus is spread in crowded, often unsanitary live poultry markets, which are common throughout Asia, trade among farms, and mass confinement operations (i.e., factory farms).
From Bird Flu: A Virus Of Our Own Hatching:
All bird flu viruses seem to start out harmless to both birds and people. In its natural state, the influenza virus has existed for millions of years as an innocuous, intestinal, waterborne infection of aquatic birds such as ducks. If the true home of influenza viruses is the gut of wild waterfowl, the human lung is a long way from home.
How does a waterfowl's intestinal bug end up in a human cough? Free-ranging flocks and wild birds have been blamed for the recent emergence of H5N1, but people have kept chickens in their backyards for thousands of years, and birds have been migrating for millions.
In a sense, pandemics aren't born--they're made. H5N1 may be a virus of our own hatching coming home to roost.
According to a spokesperson for the World Health Organization,
"The bottom line is that humans have to think about how they treat their animals, how they farm them, and how they market them--basically the whole relationship between the animal kingdom and the human kingdom is coming under stress."
Along with human culpability, though, comes hope. If changes in human behavior can cause new plagues, changes in human behavior may prevent them in the future.
So let's recap: Our trivial desire to eat chickens - and our refusal to acknowledge each individual animal's capacity to suffer and experience their lives - creates these cesspools, which are the conditions necessary for the disease to easily spread. This situation makes it difficult to contain the virus absent of these mass murders.
Therefore everyone dies, chickens, pigs, dogs, cats, and any other nonhuman that may have been in contact with the virus. Not to mention all the mice tortured, infected and murdered so that scientists may better understand how this disease affects human animals - we are the animals, of course, that systematizes the propagation of the disease that we are now murdering nonhumans to find a way to stop. A vicious cycle, but not for us.
Why not; they're just things, like old shoes, throw them out and start again.
Some of the "culling" methods are especially gruesome, such as suffocating the birds to death with sprayed foam (i.e., the type used by firefighters to, um, extinguish fires!).
If you haven't read it, Michael Greger's Bird Flu is a pretty terrifying look at the subject. The full-text is available online at http://birdflubook.com/
Thanks for the information Kelly. I'm going to add some of it to the post.