Bird Flu Outbreak 2016

centrarchid

Crossing the Road
14 Years
Sep 19, 2009
27,548
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Holts Summit, Missouri
See link: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/9-...-infected-with-bird-flu/ar-BBohql0?li=BBnb7Kz

This is occurring very close to where I am from. I have not heard of anyone with backyard flocks or even larger commercial free-range flocks that have been effected. In my current location I can see where songbirds could very much be the vectors. Managing flocks to limit stress by keeping densities down, nutrition good and very likely genetically resistant may need to be approaches.
 
How can we just keep killing birds. Do we kill all birds? How about finding which breeds(chickens, turkeys) are resistant to the disease and let those birds live. We can not just keep killing these animals. Nature will provide a natural immunity by having some survive the disease, just like in us humans-do we kill all humans when a disease breaks out. The killing of millions of birds is a genocide! that's my opinion.
 
A problem with that logic involving production birds is they are so genetically homogenous resulting for the selection almost exclusively for growth performance. Once a virus gets into a vulnerable flock kept at high densities you get what is essentially total loss whether you euthanize or not. Such problems likely to impact other species. Monocultured plants are also vulnerable for same reason. Effort may need to be invested in developing production strains that differ with respect to vulnerability to disease in addition to good production characteristics. That will take time and cost money. The biosecurity approach alone does not seem to work with this bug.
 
Anyone on the ground in this area? Across the river in Illinois the news reports that inspectors are knocking on doors to find, test and presumably cull backyard flocks, in addition to the concentrated operations. I know how they depopulate commercial barns (its definitely not humane, as they claim) but I'm wondering how they would go about insuring depopulation in backyard flocks. Do they leave it up to the owner? Do they confiscate the birds? In commercial operations birds are composted in place in the barn, how on earth do you dispose of birds on small farms and backyards?
 
Last round of bird flu here did not involve depopulating backyard flocks. Verify your source on that. My understanding is backyard flocks are not the problem except possibly in the eye of larger commercial opperators grabbing straws trying to protect their livelihoods. If the bird flu makes the jump to going after humans and does show up in backyard flocks then that is when I would expect backyard flocks to be culled in a given area. Problem would still remain in that actual vector is songbird population that could not be culled making such efforts not very effective.
 
How can we just keep killing birds. Do we kill all birds? How about finding which breeds(chickens, turkeys) are resistant to the disease and let those birds live. We can not just keep killing these animals. Nature will provide a natural immunity by having some survive the disease, just like in us humans-do we kill all humans when a disease breaks out. The killing of millions of birds is a genocide! that's my opinion.


Honestly its humans that are causing this!! These big barns with unhealthy birds that cannot build up immunities are causing it. The only way to stop the disease is to stop giant farms. Pastured poultry have enough of an immunity to not catch this virus because they are exposed to stuff in the ground and in grass and their imunities to different disease and virus grow and that is why you are only seeing these out breaks in big commercially raised flocks. There has been one incident of a backyard flock but those birds had never seen the light of day which is why they got it. The rest have been commercial flocks. I dont know what we can do to show the big guys that if they simpley change the way they raise birds they wont have as big of a problem! But all they care about is money. Not our health in better raised meat and not the animals health.
 
Anyone on the ground in this area? Across the river in Illinois the news reports that inspectors are knocking on doors to find, test and presumably cull backyard flocks, in addition to the concentrated operations. I know how they depopulate commercial barns (its definitely not humane, as they claim) but I'm wondering how they would go about insuring depopulation in backyard flocks. Do they leave it up to the owner? Do they confiscate the birds? In commercial operations birds are composted in place in the barn, how on earth do you dispose of birds on small farms and backyards?
I live in this area and no backyard flocks were found to be infected and NONE were destroyed.
 

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