The grisly questions confronting the country as bird flu nears

Tuesday, 24 September 2024

Workers on an industrial egg farm during an avian influenza outbreak in Czechia dump hens into a large gassing container. Masses of live hens are piled inside these containers before workers kill them with carbon dioxide gas.Credit: We Animals Media

Jennifer Dutton is the corporate relations specialist at Animals Aotearoa, an animal welfare organisation focused on the wellbeing of chickens.

OPINION: The imminent arrival of a virulent bird flu poses a grisly question - how will New Zealand try to stamp this disease out when it reaches our shores?

Until now, our isolated island nation has been afforded a shield of protection as the disease sweeps the globe, killing upwards of half a billion birds so far.

Now the deadliest strain has been detected in wild birds in Antarctica, as well as different versions of the disease popping up in Australian poultry farms. It’s only a matter of time until infected migrating birds will burst our bubble of luck. Government papers reveal the short-term plan for when a strain of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), known more commonly as bird flu, is detected is “depopulate, dispose, disinfect”.

Practically speaking, how will our nation conduct such a mass killing of potentially hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of birds?

Government and poultry industry reps have travelled to comparable production markets in both Australia and the UK to seek advice on what to do when our farmed birds are infected. Investigating the details of how they might carry out the collective death sentence reads like a macabre menu of horrors.

A response to an Official Information Act request about the Government's plans for disease management has many redacted sections. It seems they’d rather keep such unpalatable discussions away from the ears of caring Kiwis.

“Humane depopulation” is the sanitised term for such a mass killing. But in practice, it’s an oxymoron of the highest order. When it comes to exterminating huge numbers of sentient beings, either efficient lethality is the primary goal, or doing so in a more humane way, where softening the experience of the victims, is prioritised. It can’t be both.

Sadly, the repeated result overseas sees countries choose killing methods that are cheaper and simpler to execute. “Better” by perhaps every metric, except when considering actual animal welfare.

There’s a plethora of ways to commit a mass killing of farmed animals at an infected site where handling the animals is undesirable. “Ventilation shutdown” is perhaps the most feral. All ventilation systems that control airflow and appropriate temperature are deliberately shut off, with the option to also pump heat or carbon dioxide into the sealed-off shed, to effectively cook the chooks alive. It’s the “dog in a hot car” approach but scaled up to create a giant oven where, over several hours, the birds panic in the soaring temperature, inducing deadly heat stroke in 30,000+ chickens at a time.

A weak and wet turkey poult stands closed-eyed amid thick firefighting foam that also covers their dead flockmates. Following the detection of avian influenza in the turkey flock at this Israeli kibbutz, authorities used compressed firefighting foam to kill the birds.Credit: We Animals Media

Another method is to pump one of various types of expansion foam into the sheds. The foam covers the floor to smother the chickens in a dense layer that obstructs their airways, suffocating them to death under the layer of bubbles.

A third way is to retrofit production sheds into on-farm gas chambers. Called “whole house gassing”, the lower section of a poultry shed is tented off with plastic curtains and liquid CO2, or similar, is injected inside. The gas evaporates and gasses the chickens until they’re dead. Or, most of them anyway. All of the above methods usually have some unlucky survivors who endured the full horror but didn’t yet succumb.

If these practices sound outrageous and extreme, it’s because they are. It makes the Animal Welfare Act not worth the paper it’s printed on. So where will our Government put its money? Is the Agriculture Minister’s talk of New Zealand sporting the gold standard in animal welfare actually true, or is it all just toxic hot air?

The OIA response from Biosecurity NZ wouldn't say which method the Government plans to use, nor did it rule any out. Chief Veterinary Officer Mary van Andel wrote, “the decision on which [destruction] option to use cannot be made before an outbreak occurs”.

Considering the necessary resource investments, specialised training required and the need to act quickly once a site is infected, this indecision seems highly implausible. Unless the Ministry for Primary Industries is just planning to turn the air off and seal the factory doors shut until the chickens are baked alive? I hope not.

We are now in a deep pickle of our own making. Collective greed over the last half century has got us here. The insatiable desire to create cheap meat, raising more animals faster and bigger in abhorrent, unhealthy factory farm conditions has engineered the perfect petri dish of disease. A rise in zoonotic infection and antibiotic resistance corresponds with our ever-increasing investment in factory farming animals.

We’re precariously poised on the edge of a problem we engineered and will have to face the distasteful consequences of our own design. Though perhaps the public won’t be told much if the Government has its way. Right now, we’re just left to look at the sand as the tide pulls away from the beach, tsunami wave building.