Endangered chickens endanger the enivronment
The poultry industry sustained devastating losses from a bad strain of bird flu this year, euthanizing more than 50 million infected broiler chickens and turkeys in the past nine months, but if you’re worried about Thanksgiving turkey supply, don’t be. There will be plenty of cheap turkeys available for American families to put on their tables this year.
That, in fact, is the problem. The poultry industry is hurtling into a gathering storm, even as it forges ahead with business as usual. Avian influenza is especially acute this year, but disease is a chronic problem that routinely kills millions of birds every year. Consumers, meanwhile, are blindly supporting an industry that deserves far more scrutiny.
There’s a reason that a mass die-off of 50 million birds is barely hurting supply: The poultry industry produces 9 billion broiler chickens a year, along with about 220 million turkeys. 400 million hens lay roughly 112 billion eggs a year.
Much of the industry’s growth took place in recent decades with the introduction of antibiotics, growth hormones, new breeds of fast-growing birds, and massive climatecontrolled poultry houses.
U.S. poultry production surpassed pork production in the 1980s and beef production in the 1990s, as it became an evercheaper form of protein. Between 2012 and 2022 the number of pounds of chicken consumed by the average American each year surged from about 78 pounds to 97 pounds — nearly double the annual consumption of pork (51 pounds per capita) and beef (58 pounds).
As production surged, the impact of diseases rose, too. Just as colds and flus pass seasonally through human populations, avian influenza strains ebb and flow every year. As they migrate, duck and geese populations bring diseases that are benign to wild birds but can be devastating to domestic poultry.
The 2015 bird flu outbreak was, until this year, the largest animal disease event in U.S. history, afflicting a vast swath of the domestic poultry populations.
No vaccines have yet been developed that can prevent avian influenza. And while vaccines can reduce the morbidity of disease, any infected bird must be killed — along with the thousands of other birds in its facility — to control the outbreak and protect trade (there are tight restrictions against exporting products from poultry houses with diseased birds).
Here is where a vicious cycle comes into play: The more deaths there are in the poultry industry, the more chickens and turkeys are raised to offset those deaths.
And the ever-larger populations are, in turn, more likely to spread disease and increase the impact when it hits. Growing poultry populations can also increase the risk of viruses that could be spread to wild bird populations, along with the risk of zoonotic diseases that could be transferred to humans.
The question becomes: How much further can we keep expanding the number of domestic birds that are grown and slaughtered? How much longer can this vicious cycle continue before it explodes?
There are ways to contain the threat of avian flu going forward: The industry can improve its biosafety measures to prevent contaminants — typically in the form of bird droppings from migrating geese and fowl — from getting into poultry houses.
The industry could also deconsolidate — dividing its production facilities into smaller, less centralized poultry houses, so that when pathogens are introduced, smaller populations must be euthanized.
The industry could also pour more resources into developing vaccines that prevent the influenza virus altogether rather than just weaken it. But these solutions are years, if not decades away.
In the meantime, the industry will continue to engage in a staggering amount of waste of both sentient life and environmental resources at a time when, as United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at the ongoing UN Climate Change Conference, COP27: “Our planet is fast approaching the tipping point that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”
This is enough to rattle an optimist like me. In the long term, I have high hopes for the shift toward conservation agriculture and cultivated meat, which this month reached a major milestone in the Food and Drug Administration approval process that will pave the way for production in the U.S.
But that’s still years away from mass adoption, and in the near term, I’m at a loss for solutions, except for this: In the coming days, consider buying your Thanksgiving bird at a small local farm — they can be found near most every urban center. Or opt for a Tofurkey.