(Beth Clifton collage)
How exactly did Louisiana H5N1 victim become infected?
WILTON, Iowa; ANN ARBOR, Michigan––Much as agribusiness might hate to admit it, pressure to improve poultry welfare promises to make the egg industry more efficient, more profitable, and less inhumane––and the rising price of eggs, meanwhile, has less to do with the industry changes than with the failure of the U.S. federal and state governments to effectively address the avian influenza H5N1 by cracking down on cockfighting.
Take from the egg industry, via Scott McFetridge, Associated Press news editor for Iowa and Nebraska.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Beginning of the end for macerating male chicks?
“Every year the U.S. egg industry kills about 350 million male chicks because, while the fuzzy little animals are incredibly cute, they will never lay eggs, so have little monetary value,” McFetridge wrote on December 19, 2024, from a HyLine North America production facility in Wilton, Iowa that supplies the NestFresh brand.
“That longtime practice,” which wastes close to half the effort and expense of producing fertile eggs to replenish layer flocks, “is changing,” McFetridge continued, “thanks to new technology that enables hatcheries to quickly peer into millions of fertilized eggs and spot male embryos, then grind them up for other uses before they mature into chicks.
“The system began operating this month in Iowa at the nation’s largest chick hatchery, which handles about 387,000 eggs each day.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
What’s a Cheggy machine?
The egg sexing device, using intense light to inspect 25,000 eggs per hour right through their intact shells, is called the Cheggy machine, developed by the German firm Agri Advanced Technologies in response to a German ban on culling newly hatched chicks that took effect on January 1, 2022.
A similar ban took effect in France on January 1, 2023.
In the U.S., meanwhile, McFetridge explained, day-old chicks are culled through live maceration, using “whirling blades to nearly instantly kill the baby birds — something that seems horrifying but that the industry has long claimed is the most humane alternative.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Feather shading
“Chick culling,” McFetridge added, “is an outgrowth of a poultry industry that for decades has raised one kind of chicken for eggs and another for meat. Egg-laying chickens are too scrawny to profitably be sold for meat, so the male chicks are ground up and used as additives for other products.”
The Cheggy machine works “by noting feather shading,” McFetridge said. “Males are white; females are dark. The process has one key limitation: It works only on brown eggs because male and female chicks in white eggs have similar-colored feathers.
“That’s not a huge hindrance in Europe,” McFetridge noted, “where most eggs sold at groceries are brown. But in the U.S., white shell eggs make up about 81% of sales, according to the American Egg Board.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Consumer choice
This may change, just as consumer preference for whole grain bread and brown rice in the present century has steadily eroded a more-than-a-century-long general preference for white bread and white rice.
The Cheggy machine makers, however, hope to be able to sex the embryos in fertilized white eggs within five years, McFetridge said, mentioning that “Other companies also are working to meet what is expected to be a growing demand.”
NestFresh executive vice president Jason Urena, meanwhile, expects to be marketing eggs sourced from in-ovo sexed hens by June 2025.
Free-range hens on deep litter.
(Merritt Clifton photo)
Michigan going cage-free
Michigan Live environmental reporter Lucas Smolcic Larson also looked into the price of eggs on December 19, 2024.
“Beginning on New Year’s Eve,” Larson explained, Michigan supermarkets and retailers “will be prohibited from selling shell eggs from caged chickens, with limited exceptions,” for producers keeping fewer than 3,000 hens.
“The shift, years in the making,” Larson wrote, “has the potential to inflate costs already pumped up by outbreaks of avian flu.
“Breakfast restaurants slinging omelets and other egg-based dishes are bracing for price shocks. On grocery coolers, signs warn customers some cartons of conventional eggs will disappear at the end of the year,” Larson observed.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Vincenzina, price, & a horror story
Michigan State University professor of consumer and food economics Vincenzina Caputo told Larson that according to her research, 55% of shoppers “are primarily motivated by price and don’t discriminate between conventional and cage-free eggs. If prices remain unchanged and conventional eggs are yanked from store shelves, consumers choosing not to buy eggs at all could increase by 20 percentage points.”
But after a 15-year phase-in of the new hen housing requirements, Michigan Allied Poultry Industries executive director Nancy Barr said, “Our producers are ready. They have spent a lot of time and money getting there, but they are committed to the cage-free housing for all of their hens and pullets.”
(Beth Clifton photo)
Cage-free vs. H5N1
Wrote Larson, “Cage-free hens are roughly 40% of the U.S. flock, but that’s a growing figure. That doesn’t mean they must be given outdoor access. Each bird must have between 1 and 1.5 square feet of usable floor space under the standards Michigan has adopted,” about twice as much space, with much more freedom of movement, than hens get in conventional battery caging.
“Recent federal figures show advertised prices of cage-free eggs surpassed conventional varieties by some 45¢,” Larson said, but noted that, “In general, egg prices have been on the rise in the Midwest this year. The price of a dozen was 91% higher in November 2024 compared to a year prior, reaching $3.94, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
Greg Herbruck, chief executive of Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch, Inc., identified by Larson as “Michigan’s largest egg producer,” responded that, “An increase in egg pricing has less to do with the cage-free law than it does with supply and demand and the impacts of the bird flu.”
Jim Keen, DVM, Ph.D. (Facebook photo)
“H5N1 continues unabated”
“The U.S. bird flu H5N1 epidemic that began in February 2022 continues unabated,” commented Center for a Humane Economy director of veterinary science Jim Keen, DVM., PhD.
“So far,” Keen pointed out in a Center for a Humane Economy media release, “124 million poultry have died from bird flu or been culled on 588 commercial poultry farms and 726 ‘backyard’ farms in all 50 states.
“The virus has also infected at least 866 dairy cattle herds nationwide,” Keen noted, “and at least 61 poultry and cattle workers. This is the most serious bird flu outbreak in a century.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Backyard poultry” is often euphemism for gamefowl
Explained the Center for a Humane Economy, “The USDA and its Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service euphemistically classify game fowl operations as ‘backyard poultry.’
“Based on the fighting breeds present and their distinctive housing, gamefowl farms are easy to identify, and cannot be confused with people who raise birds for eggs, meat, or show,” but the USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service––which is also responsible for enforcing federal legislation against cockfighting––balks at identifying cockfighting facilities as such in order to secure cooperation in identifying and combatting disease outbreaks from cockfighters.
This policy, in effect for more than 50 years, has been conspicuously ineffective.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Cockfighting has enormous role in the spread of avian disease”
“Based on my past experience in responding to avian disease crises on the ground in California, cockfighting operations play an enormous role in the spread of avian disease,” Keen added.
“The USDA has a dangerous history of underplaying the role of the cockfighting industry in the bird flu epidemic,” Keen charged, “and the agency must provide more detailed information on the cockfighting role in this crisis so it can be addressed as a law enforcement priority.”
The Center for a Humane Economy and the allied Center for a Humane Economy pointed out that, “Ten of the 15 virulent Newcastle disease outbreaks in the United States originated from illegally smuggled game fowl for cockfighting,” causing the deaths of at least 16 million poultry and expenditure equivalent to $1 billion to control.
(Beth Clifton collage)
H5N1 can kill people
But Newcastle disease affects only birds. The H5N1 avian flu can kill people.
Announced the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention on December 18, 2024, “A patient has been hospitalized with a severe case of avian influenza in Louisiana,” the last U.S. state to ban cockfighting and still a hub of cockfighting activity.
“This marks the first instance of severe illness linked to H5N1 in the USA,” the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention said, explaining that the strain in the Louisiana case is distinctly different from the much milder form contracted so far by cattle in multiple states, and 61 dairy workers who had exposure to infected cattle, mostly in California.
The Louisiana victim was later identified as over age 65 and in critical condition.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Patient had exposure to sick & dead birds in backyard flocks”
“While an investigation into the source of the infection in Louisiana is ongoing,” the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention continued, “it has been determined that the patient had exposure to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks.
“This is the first case of H5N1 bird flu in the USA that has been linked to exposure to a backyard flock,” according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention acknowledged that “H5N1 virus infection has previously been associated with severe human illness in other countries, including illness resulting in death.”
Merritt & Beth Clifton with Henry the rooster.
The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention did not acknowledge, however, that approximately 274 of the 464 human deaths from H5N1 documented by the World Health Organization involved victims who had probable exposure to gamefowl.
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