Free Range Chickens and Ducks Dangerous to Humanity
The evidence is now clear: Free-range chickens and ducks are a major, direct threat to humans worldwide.
Fortunately, we can prevent a massive, global replay of the Spanish flu epidemic that killed perhaps 25 million people in 1918–19 simply by putting the world’s poultry into confinement houses.
Despite the protests of the “natural and organic” movement, letting our chickens outdoors encourages the bird flu virus to evolve. That could trigger millions of human deaths if the new H5N1 bird flu virus morphs again into an airborne form that can be transmitted directly between people.
Do free-range chickens really need to be abolished to prevent bird flu, or is this just a way for factory farms to finally take over?
The solution to the bird flu danger? We must put our poultry flocks indoors, where the birds are more comfortable, commit less cannibalism, and have less interaction with people and wild birds.
It’s time to step around the free-range chicken cult and eliminate the pandemic threat of bird flu. It’s time to put the world’s poultry flocks indoors.
Do you agree? Is this a valid argument?
Interesting links:
McDonald’s isolates chickens to fight bird flu
Avian influenza frequently asked questions
Free-range birds at more risk for avian flu
ya, OK, this from a group that cant find there OWN head in the sand…
Take a bunch of ANY animal, and shove it into an INCLOSED area…
1 gets a BUG and the rest get it also…
LIKE WOW…THATS SMART….
COME ONE, pull the corn out of your EAR…
Anyone want to explain why we should stop the avian flu?
Wouldn’t a thinning of the herd right about now be a good thing?
This all sounds like BS PR designed to keep people eating facotry food…ugh. Nonsense. Appropriate for the “cage” match methinks.
If you look at the article, the whole site is obviously one of those wacko sites with an agenda.
Perhaps the real answer to bird flu is for everybody to go vegetarian. The spreading of bird flu comes from close contact between birds and humans, and obviously, if we didn’t pluck them, if we didn’t kill them and if we didn’t eat them, we’d have a lot less contact.
BUCK-BUCK-BUCKTROL-BEAKFREAK
Control all production, control all pricing and availability, and
THINK you control the health because you control feed and antibiotic use and misuse. Normal immunity does not have a chance to develope in the longer lived organism but oh boy do those short lived
little infective things mutate out of control.
Exactly why plagues and epidemics start in dorms, central cities, crowded living conditions. Ask any epidemiologist. jh
Why is it always the cowboys who want to thin the herd??jh
I’m not at all nostalgic about my experiences as a young man with poultry farming. There are hardly dumber critters on this planet. And that was before battery chickens were hybridized. I certainly remember that aggressive and cannibalistic behavior was more likely with closely confined poultry rather than free range.
I’d be willing to bet that the farmers raising free range, natural or organic, poultry generally have healthier birds in the first place — compared to the distorted freaks offered up by the mass producers. As someone who likes to cook, the taste difference alone tells me something about the health of the birds.
I just heard a reporter on NPR saying he was pretty surprised to see a “free range” farm.
For a short period of their lives, there is a small door the chickens could got out of if they were smart enough to a small pen open to the sky.
But they almost never do, so the “free range” thing is pretty much a gimick. But we all assumed that, didn’t we?
What a bunch of ass hats. The only reason to put these birds indoors is to get more meat from less square footage.
The practices of the meat barns are unappealing as well, these birds are pumped full of anti-biotics(disease spreads faster and easier in crowded conditions).
Growth hormones – yuck
And they are locked up away from all the grashoppers, skeeters and assorted other flying and crawling vermin.
Outdoor chickens taste far better as well, Eideard is right on.
5&6…VERY true…
But this site goes towards those persons that THINK…..
Chickens cant fly
then how did OURS end up in the trees, IF they couldnt fly??
Unless you BREAD it out of them, they CAN fly… Not much better then a pheasant…but they do..
I’m surprised that not many Westeners keep chicken as pets. I mean, thay are not that hard to take care of. Once they get old enough, you can eat them. How great is that. It is very common in Asia and Africa to find families rearing their own chicken in their back yard. I guess it is more condusive to do it in a village environment than in a town or city, but I have neighbours in the city who actually manage to do it.
When H5N1 mutates into a human to human aerosol infection it will be spread world wide by airliners, not chickens. Governments are too slow to quarantine due to fears of economic damage.
Dennis T. Avery, author of the tract “Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic,” proudly describes himself as a missionary. His mission: to protect and promote “high-yield farming to save wildlife.”
A man with a different agenda than promoting science.
As someone once said, follow the money.
12…
I WONDER WHY…
6 AM wake up call??
8 ft fence to keep them in the yard??
THEY can be agressive??
THEY cant take the cold…
Um…last time I checked the deadly bird flu virus isn’t a human pathogen yet.
EAT MORE BEEF! (a public service announcement brought to you by your local beef council)
Mad cow disease is not an airborne contagion.
FYI, I believe America Daily is a neo-con pro-business whack job nutcase outfit. I hear tin foil hats ARE required.
ECA…when it’s discussed regarding “birds that cannot fly” it doesn’t mean the flutter and going 6 feet…it means long distance flight, like 200 yards or more, sustained. Chickens have wings, domestic ducks have wings…they can get some loft, but not more than a few feet, at best. And, chickens tend to just do a big flutter to get to the lowest tree branch, and never go any higher. Ducks, never go into trees, by the way, but they can often get a good run, then hop, and flap hard and can go MAYBE a few feet by gliding.
When people talk about FLYING birds they mean…like what Canadian Geese do…..fly for hundreds of miles. OR what pigeons do…fly to the tops of telephone poles and sit on the lines. I know you’ve NEVER SEEN a chicken roosting on a telephone line….and you never will.
Bread? I assume you mean BRED.
Eat more Pork…. the other white meat!
(brought to you by the pig breeder’s lobby)
What a bunch of hooey!
I’ll keep eating the free range chickens for one reason….
THEY TASTE BETTER!!!!!
It’s propaganda designed to wage fear in the minds of the small minded public.
Remember, even pigs can fly, provided they travel at the proper velocity.
Have any of you ever seen a free-range operation? They are very damaging to the environment! Free range pigs only leave poisonous plants in their “range.” Chickens are almost as bad if they are free range and raised in the densities required to feed lots of people My dad’s 40 acres is adjacent to a turkey breeding farm. Yes it stinks about 2 weeks per year, but that is the price of feeding a country.
Farm them in buildings and you can control their erosive damage to the environment. You also will have a better chance of controlling the phosphorus and nitrates by land applying them to fescue at agronomic rates. CAFO’s suck, but they are better than free range animals at the quantities currently produced.
We had chickens when I was a kid. The best they could do is fly to their roost a couple of feet off the ground. Mind you, they needed to jump on two steps to get that high. I have never seen a chicken fly more then 2 feet horizontally, maybe that was when my mean Uncle George helped one fly with his foot. The last time I ever saw a chicken on the telephone pole, I think Uncle George helped it up there too.
I think the eggs tasted better too. After Mom washed the specks off of course.
Keeping the chickens indoors is probably the wrong way to go about stemming humans contacting H1N1. The bird flu manifests itself deep into the deepest part of the lungs. Regular flus confine themselves to the upper respiratory tract. Because the virus has to invade so deep into the body is why casual contact hasn’t spread the disease more. Also because of the deepness in the lungs is part of the reason it is so difficult to treat.
In an enclosed building it will be much easier for the virus to be inhaled deeper into the lungs then it would outside. All the victims of Bird flu so far have been those working in close contact with sick birds. That is not only farmers, but also butchers and shop keepers.
The authors are employed at the Hudson Institute, a right wing “think tank”. I too think they have an agenda. Tyson Foods?
I guess I’m the only one here with a fflock of chickens….
Mine aren’t free-range, but pastured and cooped. (They get to roam when it’s not raining, they stay in and get scraps when it is.) Eggs are great, they all the household kitchen eat leftovers (no food waste here) they eat bugs, “clip the lawn” and for the most part, are interesting pets that give a bonus EGGS. Really GOOD eggs with hard shells, and deep orange yolks.
I’m more inclined to worry about bird flu showing up in closely contained “poultry factories”…where they get no room to move, no fresh air, no sunshine, nothing but antibiotic laced processed foods that they eat with their clipped beaks. I worry about the inferior breeding birds that are designed to grow quickly, show their sex by fuzz color at hatch (sex linked). I really worry about egg factories where thousands of birds are kept in controlled enviroments (lights on 24/7) and pushed to lay, lay, lay until they’re exhausted….at less than a year, and then sold for “Chicken McNuggets”, or ground up into feed for the new batch of chicks getting ready to start their short-lived laying career.
I’m sorry, but this is just nonsense…..even an idiot should see that healthy raised birds will provide a better product and a safer product, than the offal of the mass breeding greedy poultry concerns.
But, our country is nutty about MORE FOOD CHEAPER to keep our faces stuffed and butts filled out. FEED ME MORE should be our national slogan. I mean, come on….who wants Kentucky Fried Chicken Wings for 99cents…..??? The better choice is …who need them. I’d rather pay ten times as much for some taste and something healthy.
Give me a break. Check out sourcewatch.org and you’ll see that the Hudson Institute is funded by (among others) ConAgra Foods and Monsanto.