High Pathogen avian Influenza

PERHAPS NO AGRICULTURAL TOPIC right now creates a sharper contrast between the “life is biology” versus “life is mechanics” philosophy than High Pathogen Avian Influenza (HPAI). In less than a year, the United States has exterminated more than 58 million chickens, turkeys, and ducks by government mandate.

For the uninitiated, realize that if one bird in a million on a farm tests positive for HPAI, every bird on that property must be exterminated. The industry uses the term euthanized, but that is not the right word. Euthanizing is what you do to a suffering pet that has no hope of recovery. It’s an end-of-suffering kind of thing. Most of the birds being killed due to HPAI are neither sick nor showing symptoms of being sick; they just happen to be in proximity to sick birds and get caught up in the melee.

To be sure, HPAI is a real thing and does kill birds. But just like covid, which is also a real thing, proper responses vary. The orthodoxy right now is to annihilate every proximate bird, healthy or not. Complete extermination. It’s being done to such an extent these days that our nation now has a Foaming Association that poultry growers can join to be first in line when the extermination order comes.

How do you kill 15,000 turkeys in a confinement house? Or 50 million chickens in a layer house? You can’t electrocute. Starvation is too slow. Ah, soap suds. You close all the windows and doors and pump in soap suds that suffocate everything and then dissipate into nothing. All you have after the foam leaves is carcasses to pick up. Efficient and cheap. How many of you want to join the Foaming Association?

The official narrative regarding this disease is that it’s spread by wild waterfowl. Isn’t it interesting that these supposed carriers don’t themselves succumb to the disease? This brings up an interesting question about how you respond to disease. That question prompts an even deeper question: Why did something get a disease? Or we could even ask what the purpose of disease is?

Bible believers understand that we live in a fallen world, where corruption and disease are all a part of losing the Edenic paradise. But clearly, the Pentateuch’s instructions about land, hygiene, religious protocols, and finances indicate that the Israelites would enjoy fewer diseases than other people. Leprosy occurred, but it was rare.

Usually, disease or complete functional breakdown occurs because protocols surrounding health aren’t—or weren’t—followed. This includes stress, of course. Envy rots the bones, according to Proverbs. My point is that things don’t break down without a reason.

Right now, nobody knows why low-path avian influenza turns into high-path. Nobody actually knows the vectors. In domestic poultry flocks, HPAI devastates, but it never kills all the birds. Somehow in the midst of the catastrophe, some birds never succumb and continue to thrive. All genetic understanding, adaptation, and immunological development indicate that the most reasonable response to HPAI is to protect and propagate the survivors.

The complete extermination policy makes no sense. If you have a rampant disease, why would you also kill the survivors? Wouldn’t you want to hang onto them at all costs, breed them, and reward whatever created a more robust immune system? It’s such a simple question, but apparently, nobody in the industry is asking it. The official policy is the complete extermination of every bird on the property.

Even Darwinian evolutionists promoting survival of the fittest should reject such a nonsensical policy. How do we know which ones are fittest if we kill them all? In order to find the fittest, something must survive. A blanket extermination insures no survivors and therefore no discovery or development regarding fitness. The complete extermination policy flies in the face of reason and our current scientific understanding.

Could it be that the reason we don’t see major die-offs in the alleged wild fowl vectors is that over time the susceptible ones did die, and the survivors developed such a robust immune system that even high pathogenic strains aren’t deadly? That thinking certainly dovetails with a reasonable understanding of adaptation and immunological function.

HPAI is relatively weak. Temperatures as low as 85 degrees Fahrenheit kill it, which is why it spikes in the winter. For something that weak to decimate the poultry industry indicates profound fragility.

I recently attended the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association (APPPA) annual convention in Dallas and had the privilege of spending time with three growers whose flocks contracted HPAI in 2022. Their stories were grisly and horrifying. Two were hatcheries whose flocks are housed in barns. The other had flocks of 3,000 on pasture. The outdoor bird producer had been dealing with cholera for several years.

All three were required to exterminate all their birds, even though all three said their HPAI symptoms were only in a tiny number of their birds. After extermination and disinfection, they were allowed to get back in business quickly. The outdoor grower received a clean bill of health in 45 days.

Now folks, I want you to just think about this for a minute. Here’s a farm with 45,000 chickens. They find HPAI in a few and have to kill all 45,000. In less than two months, they can repopulate completely as if nothing had ever happened. If something is lethal enough to demand exterminating more than 42,000 non-symptomatic birds, would you think everything is perfectly fine in 45 days? In the world of biology, 45 days is the blink of an eye. You can scarcely recover from a bad cold in 45 days. None of this makes sense.

Back in 2015, HPAI flared up in the U.S., resulting in a 55 million bird extermination. Nobody knows why it stopped. And nobody knows why it came back in 2022. With all these unknowns, you would think people in the industry would step back in humility and see what nature has in mind. Airplane pilots learn early that engineers design the plane to fly straight. Novice pilots encountering rough air tend to panic, fighting the controls to compensate for ups and downs. The universal answer is, “Take your hands off the controls, and the plane will level on its own.”

Many times, interventions create more problems than solutions. Especially if we can’t really identify the problem. HPAI rears its ugly head cyclically, and nobody knows why. But the industry responds with mandatory extermination and investment in vaccine technology. The industry hopes it’ll come up with a vaccine to eliminate the problem. All of this is a narrow solution option.

One of the HPAI outbreaks that decimated Virginia flocks a couple of decades ago sent a swarm of Federal veterinarians into our area. A team of them visited our farm, and I wouldn’t let them out of their car. They didn’t wash off their tires before driving in. And they certainly didn’t wash them off going out. They didn’t follow their own rudimentary biosecurity procedures.

Two of the federal veterinarians did come and visit me over that time because they’d heard of this weird farm and wanted to check it out. They weren’t here to take blood samples or spy. Both said, without provocation, that all the federal vets knew the problem was too many birds crammed in too tight density in too many houses located too closely together. But they said if any of them publicly made such a comment, he’d be fired within a day.

Is HPAI a conspiracy? Who knows? Is it real?

Yes. Is the best response mandatory extermination of every bird and a future vaccine? No. Chickens are highly susceptible to respiratory problems. They scratch and dust and fluff, living in dusty conditions. If those dusty conditions are unhygienic, they will breathe in pathogenic particles. In an industrial confinement house, of course, fecal particulate coats all the tender respiratory membranes. Flocks of more than 1,000 birds in size create emotional stress on the birds.

Unhygienic conditions can happen in a backyard flock if it’s in a dirt yard or unsanitary bedding. Nature sanitizes in two ways: rest and sunshine or vibrant decomposition (like a compost pile). Nature never creates sterility; living systems thrive in a veritable biological soup of microbes. The whole idea is to have enough good microbes that overwhelm the bad ones; about 95 percent of microbes are good, and only a few are pathogenic.

The correct response to HPAI is first to leverage the survivors. Be grateful that the strong identified themselves and then do everything possible to duplicate their genetics. Second, don’t spray down things with anti-microbials; rather, cultivate habitats that encourage a broad range of microbes. Third, get the chickens into an environment that is hygienic and sanitary—that’s not sterility; it’s sanitary, meaning it’s not toxic or pathogenic. Rest and sunshine if they’re outside or vibrant decomposition if they’re inside or in a coop are the two best ways to stay ahead of disease. Dirt is the worst condition you can have for your chickens.

A deeply bedded run is fine because the dirt has a layer of vibrantly decomposing carbon on top of it. Chickens on a compost pile tend to have robust immunity. Don’t be paranoid about HPAI. It’s out there, but a good habitat with young, healthy chickens can go a long way to reducing risk. //