Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.
Just pump nitrogen in the sealed pens. The animal doesn’t panic due to perceived oxygen deprivation. They just get sleepy and die.
Hell it would be the way I’d want to go if I was sick with terminal cancer. Cheap, easy, and painless.
I imagine that would be pretty difficult to do in a chicken coop. These are barns made out of corrugated steel and generally aren't even remotely air tight. You will, ultimately, need about 10x the nitrogen you would otherwise need, and that's if it even works.
So a special coop would need to be built for this purpose.
Chicken farmers are some of the poorest farmers in the country. They generally don't have the means to build a special kill shed to humanely euthanize their flock. They barely have the means to keep up with Tyson and Perdue's ridiculous bullshit.
So, while I agree, heat stroke is a fucking awful way to kill these animals, the issue isn't just "there's a humane method bro, just build a kill house bro"
The issue is, we are paying FAR too little for chicken, and most meat, honestly.
If you have millions of chickens to kill, you're not so poor of a farmer that be you can't afford to come up with a humane method to do this job.
There are several documentaries on this topic, but they don't have a lot of authority over how many chickens they buy. They're dictated a flock size, they pay for it, and then they pay to feed and raise them, then they sell them back to the people they bought the chicks from. Inevitably every year the chicken processor, whoever it may be, makes additional demands that they also have to pay out of pocket for.
I'm not justifying their actions, I'm saying they are stuck between two masters and they have no room to wiggle.
Out of complete ignorance - do Purdue or Tyson even run their own hatcheries/coops?
No.
It's cheaper to out source it this way because as their farmers are contractors they don't have to adhere to the legal responsibilities they would if they ran them in their own.
They can keep their contracted farmers in debt to them indefinitely and essentially have a class of indentured servants.
I have learned more in this discussion about chicken farming than I ever thought I would.
Sometimes I just love the internet.
Welcome to the Internet, come and take a seat.
I thought that was the case. They probably own the IP rights to the breed too, so they keep the money circulating within their own pockets
You’re not wrong and nuance is often the bane of rationality. I didn’t say it was an easy solution just a more humane one.
Why would anyone get into chicken farming if it makes you one of the poorest farmers in the country? Are they stupid?
Why do people work fast food jobs if they don't pay a living wage?
You're blaming the poor for being poor. If you care so strongly about this, you should start financially supporting poultry farmers to change vocations.
They probably don't have the land needed for beef or pork would be my guess.
I imagine there are a handful of ways to do it besides “long, slow heat stroke”
I imagine the long, slow, painful, heat stroke method is the cheapest, thus the suffering is capitalist-approved!
We are getting that heat stroke thing thrown back to us soon lol
Us: pumping heat into the atmosphere.
Mother earth: oh you guys cold? Don't worry, I got you fam!
Doesn't sound as cheap as running the heater for a few hours.
Think of the power/gas savings!
Carbon monoxide would be cheaper. We used it for euthanizing animals that couldn't be saved at the wildlife rehab center I worked at. Though, it was done with sealed induction box, not a drafty barn like someone mentioned
Sounds like it would be more expensive? Nitrogen is incredibly cheap to concentrate out of the air, 70% of what we breath is nitrogen after all.
Monoxide is incredibly cheap to produce with a crappy farm truck or old tractor. You doing need to distill or concentrate anything, just a hose and the exhaust pipe and a couple hours of fuel for idling.
We used it to gas a nest of rats that had settled in under a grain bin floor. Only a couple rats popped out and they were dazed, the dogs quickly snacked them up. The rest expired rapidly.
A chicken barn is big and drafty but you could just use multiple tractors or detune them on purpose. Any engine running rich produces a lot of CO.
Nitrogen is expensive and these buildings aren't airtight
These are engineering problems. The point is it’s way more humane than dying in a sweat lodge.
Eh, the atmosphere is 70% nitrogen, making liquid nitrogen is basically just a suped up AC.
There are also various methods of simply filtering the nitrogen out of the air. Having on site machines doesn't seem too bad.
Those big coops are not anything close to airtight. Heat, however, doesn't require it to be airtight.
wouldnt that be more expensive than just cutting off the ventilation? on top of paying for disposal afterwards & whatnot?
Disposal of what? The air we breathe is 75% nitrogen. The chickens are already going to have be disposed of.
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Or… and this is crazy… not kill them?
They are already dead. (Infected) Better to kill then now and not risk even more birds life.
Or… and this is crazy… not cram thousands of them together in such a tiny area. Then disease wouldn't spread so rapidly.
No ❤
This is specifically talking about mitigation for highly pathogenic avian influenza. HPAI kills chickens fairly quickly, so to contain the spread and minimize the risk of zoonotic spread to people, they kill every bird on every property that it's detected on.
This is one of those situations where no one thinks it's a great solution, it's just a pragmatic one that minimizes the risk towards workers while quickly depopulating the barn. The problem is that this is one of the cheapest and least humane ways to depopulate a barn, and shouldn't be allowed. We should insist that barns allow humane depopulation, or at least less inhumane methods.
Or, and I know this sounds even craizer… not farm them and stop this from happening to begin with?
And then do what with them?
Crazy how you can't think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.
Yeah we shouldn't, but we did, so we are stuck having to do shit like this now. And shamefully it's not going to change anytime soon. Corporate interests essentially control the country now to a degree that they haven't since the late 19th century. Especially in the farming industry.
Nah mate, I can totally think past it, but think past the problem doesn't solve it.
The one today? No, but the one tomorrow? Yes
Keep moving the goal posts where ever you need to do you can sleep at night babe.
Interesting that you say that, projecting maybe?
Projecting? Honey I kept the goal posts in the same place. This is obviously a pointless debate since you are to blinded by the rage you feel at people eating meat that you can't see the actual situation.
So you want to pay $50 for a McDonald's chicken sandwich? I don't think it's right. These chickens are bred to be oversized and grow fast. They get so big that they can barely move. Full of antibiotics so they don't get infected from sitting in their own leavings.
I am really hoping for lab grown meat personally.
And since you may have missed it, these chickens are all female. There are technically ways to determine sex before they hatch but if you really want to get upset Google 'Chick Grinder'. It's as horrible as it sounds so maybe don't Google it.
That being said, I don't want to pay for $50 chickens as much as I don't want to pay for $2,000 iPhones because that's what having them made without slave/child labor would probably cost…
Ugh
I was reading that Europeans actually found a way to sex the egg so they don't hatch the male eggs, thus negating the need to destroy male chicks. I'm guessing the technology costs money so it's unlikely that US factory farms would use it. Probably easier to kill the with the grinder.
I think it's kind of a false dichotomy, between spending a lower amount of money (i.e. being poor), and being ethical. I think there's a lot more we could take issue with, on how society is structured, than accept this false dichotomy. There's a better universe out there where instead of having to use paper straws, we all just switch to biodegradable, and it is incentivized that people use metal straws. Same shit with this. There's a universe out there where we eat less meat, where this meat is more sustainably sourced and is locally sourced, which cuts down on logistics, and where, as a result, we don't have to pay 50 bucks for a frankly pretty gross chicken sandwich.
Capitalism is a race to the bottom. Maximum profit/gain and minimal loss.
Not to overly malign chicken sandwiches, but the point of capitalism is to charge the maximum that the market will bear while paying the least to extract it. And morals have nothing to do with capitalism. Even if it was mandated to have humane farming we would have a boutique pampered chicken sandwich (until they're mechanically separated in 35 seconds) and foreign-sourced bleached chicken.
Anyway I prefer the tortured beef from Burger King.
Yeah. I agree. I was kind of more on the side that we should maybe not have a race to the bottom, if you can see what I'm getting at
edit: sorry if that didn't come across in my comment, I tend to not want to label every single thing as "capitalism is the problem bro!" because that puts people off, but then I kind of struggle with tiptoeing around the phrasing.
To be fair, capitalism can work. But unfettered capitalism is pure greed. And right now nearly all of the guardrails have been removed.
Industry consolidation is out of control. Citizens United gave them unlimited political influence. Their lobbyists write the laws to govern them.
I'm waiting for the return of company towns. Amazon and Walmart are selling healthcare so we're edging closer.
We're not going to change things by voting in millionaires. Run for local office. Encourage like minded people to do the same. School boards, library boards, it's all about shifting thought. It won't be quick but it will work. Beau of the Fifth Column on has several videos about building community networks. The idea is that by bringing people together, it helps grow local power.
Jeez, either you are great at walking the line between idiotic and good sarcasm or you are not
Love them
I do love them, fried and slathered in buffalo sauce.
Let them recover from the sickness?
You seem to be vastly overestimating the general health of factory farmed poultry.
Crazy how you can't think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.
Crazy how you went on repeat, can you not think past this argument?
If it aint broke dont fix it
I'm addressing that they're factory farmed birds so they probably won't get better, which makes your statement a bad idea. Don't just move the goalpost if you want to discuss stopping factory farming because I never indicated I was wanting to talk about that.
And how is that going to happen in a coupe with 200,000 packed into it?
Crazy how you can't think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.