Dear friend,

What is one of the most urgent animal welfare and human health issues playing out right now?

It’s our federal government’s response — in some ways timid, in other ways overreaching — to the rapid spread of H5N1, or bird flu, among animals and now starting to menace people.

Since bird flu was detected in our homeland in February 2022, government authorities, mainly at the USDA, have ordered the killing of 130.3 million poultry on 623 commercial poultry farms and 753 “backyard farms” in all 50 states. More than 99 million of the dead are laying hens and 17 million are turkeys, with the shrinkage in the national bird populations so profound that a carton of a dozen eggs costs $9 in some places.

The bird flu virus has mutated and also spilled over to dairy cattle. It has so far infected at least 919 dairy herds in 16 states (perhaps a million cows, out of a national population of nine million), causing widespread suffering of the cows.

The virus has also killed millions of wild animals, including 20 mountain lions, bobcats, and other captive cats at a wildlife sanctuary in Washington state.

In short, it’s a multi-species plague, crisscrossing the nation and gathering momentum. And it’s time for the Center for a Humane Economy to weigh in and influence the government’s inept response in the months ahead.

USDA Bungling the Response, Causing Immense Suffering

The USDA’s mass “depopulation” strategy for poultry is euphemistically called “ventilation shutdown,” where air flow into a factory-farm building is cut off. The heat is turned up and carbon dioxide is used to asphyxiate and cook alive as many as 300,000 birds trapped in the building. In other cases, the USDA uses firefighting foam to suffocate the hapless creatures. To be sure, this is an animal health and well-being crisis on an epic scale. And this week we are demanding action from the USDA, and signaling to the incoming Trump Administration that it must throw away the current script and rethink the response to this terrible drama.

• USDA must stop ventilation shutdown as a killing strategy, except in extreme cases. This mass killing is demonstrably inhumane, but it’s also not helping arrest bird flu spread.
  
  After three years, the outlay of $2 billion, and 130 million dead poultry, perhaps the USDA should accept that bird flu H5N1 is no longer a “foreign animal disease.” It is now established and endemic in the United States, and it is going to be with us in the years ahead. We cannot kill our way out of the crisis.


• The USDA must be more transparent about what is happening on the ground. The agency’s disease-control arm appears to put no effort into investigating cockfighting activity as one of the root causes of bird flu H5N1 spread, to say nothing of future movement of the virus. The USDA should create a unique and separate category for premises with cockfighting birds, rather than pooling them with all “backyard poultry.” This would better flag the role of cockfighting in spawning and propagating outbreaks, improve trace-back and trace-forward disease control actions, enhance post-outbreak risk factor analyses, and improve disease risk management.


• The USDA must advocate for a crackdown on rampant cockfighting. We know cockfighting spread bird flu in Asia, and there’s no reason to think that the same thing isn’t happening here, in a nation with 20 million fighting birds and thousands of backyard gamecock farms.
  
  Because cockfighters are felons in the waiting, smuggling birds, hiding valuable fighting birds from disease surveillance programs, and avoiding veterinary diagnosis and treatment of fighting birds is at the core of their illicit business model. They also ship birds by the millions in interstate and foreign commerce, threatening to spread infection far and wide, with cross-border movement particularly brisk between Mexico and the United States and an under-reported feature of the border crisis.
  
  Given its role on the front lines of the response, USDA leaders should be shouting from the rooftops and demanding that Congress pass the FIGHT Act to broaden federal enforcement capacity and send an alert to federal law enforcement to exercise the strong anti-cockfighting laws as they now exist.

We’ll plan to meet with the Trump team as soon as they assume office about this viral crisis. I am sure the incoming President doesn’t want to have to deal with bird flu spillover to humans. The COVID-19 response in 2020 became all-consuming and was a major election issue that fall.

Animal health issues and depopulation programs are animal welfare issues. And just like the world focused on live wildlife markets in China after they played a role in incubating two SARS pandemics, the nations of the world must look at human causes of bird flu spread and prevent them from creating viral chaos. The cockfighting problem is staring us in the face.

We must act, as a matter of enforcement and additional policy making, as two prongs in a much larger plan to stem the surge in bird flu spread. Agencies and policy makers need to stop fiddling while hundreds of millions of animals perish and disease threatens to cross the species barrier and upend our lives.

Please donate to help us mount a campaign to turn around the USDA’s bungled response as a new administration takes control. We cannot afford continued failures when the stakes are so high for animals and people.

For all animals,

Wayne Pacelle

P.S. Please see a more detailed analysis of the problem in our blog post today. You can read it here. And listen here to Dr. Pool and Dr. Keen discuss the issue at length in our latest episode of the Animal Wellness Podcast.