To stop a virus, California has euthanized more than 1.2M birds
latimes.com
latimes.com
That's called Just Getting Started in Iowa.
5.3 million Iowa laying hens to be destroyed in bird flu outbreak
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/20...
Now picture yourself doing that every day, 8 hours a day, for months on end. Imagine being the person giving the orders to kill. The researcher advising it.
But this article doesn't focus on that tragedy. It doesn't tell the story of those heroes who are trying to _save_ billions of animals.
These actions are necessary. The article doesn't even argue against that, and no one in their right mind would think that California and all of its workers are going out of their way to spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to kill people's chickens.
We know what happens when diseases get out of control. Whole species are wiped out. It's happened before, and it can happen again. We eat hundreds of millions of chickens a year in California already; 1.2 million is a fraction of a percent. A small price to pay to save the tens of billions of chickens in the world.
So instead of bringing the spotlight to honor these people having to do the dirty work to save our animals, we get an article feigning outrage and showcasing the reckless behavior of a few people.
It's hard for me grind an axe against those families that have had to suffer through the loss of their animals, even if the killing is for a "good reason". Humans never fair well at that violent line between emotion and reason.
But there's no two ways about it. Livestreaming the killing of animals on the internet, and inciting people to spread a deadly disease is reckless. It will only lead to far more death. You can't call yourself an animal lover and then tell people to ignore the very real threat of a disease that could wipe out billions of animals. The disease doesn't care whether that chicken is food or your family pet. It doesn't care that about your likes on facebook. It doesn't care about how much your care for your animals. It is here to kill, brutally and efficently, for no reason at all. I can't imagine an evil greater than disease, no matter how much distrust you may have for people.
I suppose I'm just frustrated by the multitude of spotlights the media is willing to shine on irrational human behavior. There's a story, just as tragic and beautiful in its own way, to be told by those on the other side of this fabricated controversy, but this article ignores that. The title of the article asks "Is it reckless or necessary?" The euthanisia was necessary. This article was reckless.
Yes, if one were to substitute humans into my comment, then it'd sound like I was advocating for nazi-esque holocausts.
Obviously I'm not, and the two are not the same. We don't raise and eat humans for food, so any arguments about livestock are clearly different than the equivalent arguments about humans.
And we have better strategies for humans anyway. We expend vast fortunes to develop vaccines; we can quarantine people; we can restrict travel; etc. All of those are strategies we use and are effective _for_humans_ to prevent the spread of disaster diseases.
But none of that is applicable to livestock. We aren't willing to spend the vast fortunes required to develop and vaccinate tens of billions of animals. Quarantine isn't effective. We can't communicate with animals. Etc.
At the end of the day, people expend millions of dollars to save a single human life. The people willing to spend that much on a pet is vanishingly small. Let alone livestock. There are clearly distinctions here which preclude a simple substitution of "human" for "chicken" in any of these arguments.
>But none of that is applicable to livestock.
Yes, they are.
For what it is worth, I think that culling millions of these animals is the smart move. I also believe that it is a small part of a larger evil; we as a species are committing industrialized murder on the scale of hundreds of billions a year.
But it is one thing to kill an animal to eat it, or to kill another person to eat what he has, in the course of survival. It is another thing entirely to construct an elaborate global mechanized system in which we impersonally breed, grow, and wantonly murder animals on the scale of hundreds of billions. The entire process from fertilization to slaughter to grocery sterilized and clean, the majority of the citizens in industrialized nations never have to feel the moral weight of the acts done in their name. They never have to consider the perspectives of their quarry, of the lives they end to further their own. All the gifts that we have cognitively above the rest of the animals come with, I think, the burden of knowledge. We have the ability to see before and after our actions, to see what effect we have on every other living and unliving thing.
When I think about what made the holocaust evil -- it wasn't the killing. We make war, and justify it, endlessly. So surely it isn't actually the killing that bothers us deep in our consciences.
What made it different was the industrial scale, and perhaps equally horrific, the way the act was done in the name of the people without their true knowledge or consent. They never even had the chance to justify it; because through the technology we developed the citizenry didn't have to feel a single effect of the acts taken in their name. They never had to be the ones to pull the trigger. They only had to sit unseeing and unfeeling and unthinking, numb and dumb, while mass murder happened only miles from their homes.
So yes. Clearly murder is okay. If only we sit and consider the acts that sustain us and then judge whether that suffering is equivalent to the value we extract from it.
I think if everyone truly understood what was happening they would not tolerate it so easily.
> Los manifestantes observan cómo los funcionarios limpian pollos sacrificados en Mira Loma, California (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Google's translation: Protesters observe how officials clean up slaughtered chickens in Mira Loma, California (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
> Los pollos de Les Kanawah están programados para ser sacrificados en Mira Loma, California (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Google's translation: Les Kanawah chickens are scheduled to be slaughtered in Mira Loma, California (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Edit: I take that back. Fourth image and on, the captions are indeed in Spanish.
BTW, that's some awful Spanish. It reads like the chicken were robots programmed to be sacrificed because the subject of the scheduling/programming was inadvertently changed from the slaughter to the chickens :P
I hope future generations look at our monstrosities and squirm in horror at how cruel and barbaric their ancestors were.
No ned to sweeten something which is not bitter.
Not to say I think what they are doing is wrong. Well maybe for the most beloved pets a quarantine may be worthwhile.
These animals were exposed to a fatal virus. I suppose it would be more humane to let them live until they exhibit sings of the disease, but this would lead to faster spread of the virus because infected birds have more time to transmit it. Testing every individual bird is logistically impossible, so culling those populations in infected areas is the only feasible way to stop the spread of disease.
> it is eu because it is “sweet”. Otherwise it is just thanatos: death.
My point is that drawing a distinction between these things is nonsensical.
Executed. Put down. Murdered. Euthanized. Slaughtered. All these words fall under the umbrella of meaning "to kill" but they all have distinct meanings about the circumstances of the killing. Since this is an intentional killing for medical reasons, euthanasia is the most accurate word to use. You could say "slaughtered" but that would incorrectly indicate that these animals were killed for meat consumption. You could say "executed" but that would incorrectly imply that these animals were killed as some sort of punishment. You could just say "killed" but that is less specific and does not indicate that this killing was done deliberately for medical reasons.
> No ned to sweeten something which is not bitter.
It doesn't "sweeten" anything, the article makes it clear that the owners of these birds are not happy to have them euthanized.
I guess the word 'euthanized' was used because typically those birds are gassed with CO2, which is a relatively humane way of killing them.