(Beth Clifton collage)
Inefficient, inhumane, & ineffective––and evades addressing the cockfighting vector
WASHINGTON, D.C.; BERKELEY, California; SACRAMENTO, California––“Since the bird flu H5N1 was detected in our homeland in February 2022, government authorities, mainly at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have ordered the killing of 134.7 million poultry,” railed Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, during a sparsely attended January 14, 2025 Zoom media conference.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Every chicken, duck, & goose in the U.S.
Ninety years ago the toll of 134.7 million poultry killed due to H5N1 would have amounted to killing every domestic chicken, duck, goose, and turkey in the entire U.S. three times over, and would have shocked and horrified the nation.
These days the poultry industry has grown so much and so many people have become used to eating chickens almost every day that hardly anyone seems to care, but Pacelle spoke on to any journalists who were awake and listening, three of whom actually filed brief articles later in the day. Unfortunately, the mass media coverage tended to miss the major points.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Demonstrably inhumane”
“The USDA’s mass ‘depopulation’ strategy for poultry,” Pacelle continued, “is euphemistically called ‘ventilation shutdown,’ where air flow into a factory farm building is cut off. The heat is turned up to asphyxiate and cook alive as many as 300,000 birds trapped in each building.
“In other cases,” Pacelle told reporters, “the USDA uses firefighting foam––carbon dioxide––to suffocate the hapless creatures.
“This mass killing is demonstrably inhumane,” Pacelle said, and is “also not helping arrest bird flu spread.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Veterinarians: comment by January 30, 2025
Across the country, Crystal Heath, DVM, founder of the Berkeley, California–based veterinary reform organization Our Honor, begged fellow veterinarians to review the latest draft of the American Veterinary Association Guidelines for the Depopulation of Animals and “submit your comments by January 30, 2025.
“Your input could significantly affect how these guidelines evolve and are implemented during existing and future crises,” Heath said.
“Veterinarians are committed to protecting the health and welfare of animals,” Heath continued. “However, there are dire circumstances—such as disease outbreaks, natural disasters, or other emergencies—where veterinarians may face the difficult decision to end the lives of large numbers of animals. These are among the most challenging tasks a veterinarian can face.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Indemnity payments
“The guidelines, first developed in April 2019, were created as part of a cooperative agreement with the USDA,” Heath explained, “and are used to set policy and indemnity payments related to the mass extermination of animals in emergency situations.
“Currently,” Heath detailed, “the USDA gives indemnity payments to producers when methods listed in the [AVMA/USDA] guidelines are used to depopulate animals. While VSD+,” short for ventilation shutdown plus heat, “is listed in the guidelines, producers are not incentivized to stockpile equipment needed, train workers, and change housing to allow less cruel methods to be used.”
Reported Heath earlier, “On June 21, 2024, the American Veterinary Medical Association House of Delegates voted to adopt its new Principles of Veterinary Medical Ethics, which added the language, ‘Depopulation of animals is an ethical veterinary procedure when the AVMA Guidelines for the Depopulation of Animals are followed.’”
(Beth Clifton collage)
AVMA has soybeans in their ears
The AVMA House of Delegates took this position even though “More than 2,000 veterinarians have signed in support of Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shutdown,” a petition “urging the AVMA to reclassify VSD+ as ‘not recommended,’” Heath wrote.
(See Can “Berkeley radicals” reform the American Veterinary Medical Association?)
“The AVMA prevented their member veterinarians who were publicly opposed to VSD+ from attending their Cargill-sponsored Humane Endings Symposium, saying that their presence would not allow for a ‘safe space’ for producers to discuss depopulation methods,” Heath recapped.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Not based on humaneness”
Now, Heath said, “Instead of listing methods as ‘preferred,’ ‘recommended in constrained circumstances,’ and ‘not recommended,’ methods are listed as ‘tier 1’, ‘tier 2,’ and ‘tier 3 methods,’ with tier 1 being the least cruel and tier 3 being the most cruel.
“I don’t refer to the methods as ‘more humane’ or ‘less humane’ because some of these methods and scenarios are not based on humaneness,” Heath pointed out.
“While a recent poll on the Veterinary Information Network of 3,059 veterinarians shows that only 1.1% of veterinarians believe VSD+ is an ethical and humane depopulation method,” Heath continued, “the new draft guidelines list VSD+ as a tier 3 method, while for poultry, it is listed as a tier 2 method.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Corporate interests are prioritized”
“We have also received numerous documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act request from the USDA,” Heath said, “that show the internal communications of AVMA leadership and members of the Panel on Depopulation that reveal how corporate interests are prioritized, over the interests of animals.
“We are currently witnessing a surge in cases of diseases like avian influenza (H5N1),” Heath cautioned, “which have led to mass culling of poultry. If the AVMA continues to condone VSD+, billion-dollar companies will continue to receive bailouts when their animals are killed using heatstroke-based methods, and there is no incentive to put plans in place to use less cruel methods.
“The AVMA’s guidelines need your input,” Heath told her fellow veterinarians, “to prevent the continued widespread use of heatstroke-based extermination methods.”
Heath invited questions from veterinarians c/o info@ourhonor.org.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Bungled response”
Meanwhile back in Washington D.C., Pacelle Zoomed on, “A necessary part of any pandemic response is to get at the source of the animal-to-human transmission pathway and to block its future spread.
“That’s why it’s so mystifying to see our federal government’s inept response to H5N1, or bird flu. That response has been, in some ways, exceedingly timid and, in other ways, grossly overreaching. Our nation is more at risk because of the government’s bungled response.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
The price of eggs
Culling, Pacelle reminded, has been done “on 637 commercial poultry farms and 773 ‘backyard farms,’” often a euphemism for cockfighting operations, “in all 50 states. Eleven million poultry have been killed in just the past 30 days. 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 about 10% more now than a year ago.
“What’s particularly scary is that this virus is built to mutate,” Pacelle explained. “And it is threatening to become more transmissible to people.
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Newcastle & H5N1
“We know that cockfighting played an enormous and documented role in the spread of H5N1 in Asia. And in the United States, we know that cockfighting was the superspreader of a closely related respiratory disease in birds,” Newcastle disease.
“Ten of the 15 virulent Newcastle disease outbreaks in the United States originated from illegally smuggled gamefowl for cockfighting,” causing the deaths of at least 16 million poultry and expenditure equivalent to $1 billion to control.
Though Newcastle disease is technically not an influenza, veterinary science has known at least since 2015 that as a Journal of Virology article was headlined, “Newcastle Disease Virus-Vectored H7 and H5 Live Vaccines Protect Chickens from Challenge with H7N9 or H5N1 Avian Influenza Viruses.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Muted on cockfighting”
“But the USDA and other health authorities are muted on the issue of cockfighting,” Pacelle charged, “even though the USDA has estimated there may be 20 million fighting birds in the United States, with millions of them trafficked all over the nation and across the world.
“The USDA and other federal agencies are guilty of a dereliction of duty on this issue,” Pacelle alleged.
“Cockfighters are smuggling birds across state lines and across the southern border. They are hiding their valuable fighting birds from disease surveillance programs. They are avoiding veterinary diagnosis and treatment of the fighting birds who are at the core of their illicit business model.
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“Birds by the millions in commerce”
“They also are shipping 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.
“The federal government,” Pacelle said, “is recklessly allowing dozens of fighting pits to continue to operate with impunity from Puerto Rico to Oklahoma to California to Guam.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Courting more risk”
“The USDA, the Department of Justice, and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention are watching from the sidelines and courting more risk of viral spread by doing very little to stem the cockfighting crime wave in our nation,” Pacelle charged further, putting in a plug for the FIGHT Act, short for the “Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking Act.”
Introduced in May 2023, the FIGHT Act died with the end of the 118th Congress, set to adjourn on January 3, 2025, but is expected to be reintroduced early in the 119th Congress, now in office.
“The federal government should be demanding that Congress pass the FIGHT Act to broaden federal enforcement capacity, and should send an alert to federal law enforcement to exercise the robust anti-cockfighting laws as they now exist,” Pacelle said.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Red state” crime
This is highly unlikely, because cockfighting in the U.S. occurs overwhelmingly in the “red states” and Congressional districts that put Donald Trump back in the White House and gave the Republicans majorities in both houses of Congress, unless either:
- The indemnity payments to poultry farms offsetting losses when flocks are killed to fight H5N1 are axed as part of the budget cuts promised by the Trump administration, also highly unlikely because of the politics involved, or
- Agribusiness itself realizes that mass culling is both highly inefficient and ineffective, and that more money is to be made by stamping out cockfighting than by stamping out flocks infected by workers who participate in cockfighting as a recreational pastime.
“The bird flu virus has already mutated and spilled over to dairy cattle,” Pacelle mentioned. “It has so far infected at least 919 dairy herds in 16 states, perhaps a million cows, out of a national population of 9 million, causing widespread suffering for the cows.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Vaccination?
Pacelle concluded with four recommendations:
“Vaccination is a more enlightened policy response.”
While no vaccine is currently federally approved for mass use in U.S. poultry flocks, vaccination is commonly used against H5N1 in the poultry flocks of several other nations.
“After three years, the outlay of $2 billion, and 135 million dead poultry,” Pacelle said, “perhaps the USDA should accept that bird flu H5N1 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.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
“USDA must be more transparent”
Further, Pacelle suggested, “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,” even though the USDA also has responsibility for enforcing the federal anti-cockfighting legislation under the Animal Welfare Act, “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,’” Pacelle concluded.
“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.
“Animal health issues and depopulation programs are animal welfare issues,” Pacelle finished. “The cockfighting problem is staring us in the face, and our federal government is twiddling its thumbs during this health crisis.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
No 4-H shows, but green light to cockfights
Meanwhile back in California, state veterinarian Annette Jones on January 7, 2025 banned poultry and dairy cattle exhibitions at fairs and shows, “to minimize the danger of exposing people and non-infected cows and birds to the H5N1 avian influenza,” until further notice.
“As of January 15, 2025,” Jones mentioned, “there have been 38 confirmed human cases of bird flu in California.”
So, 4-H participants can no longer exhibit their birds and calves, but gamefowl breeders enjoy a free pass from significant restrictions, and cockfighting continues to be nominally illegal but still blatantly evident, as Showing Animals Respect & Kindness and the Humane Farming Association documented in 2019 and 2020.
Merritt & Beth Clifton with Henry the rooster.
(See More cockfighters than stars in Doris Day/Clint Eastwood country? and Wildfires, COVID-19, & cockfighting besiege Monterey County.)
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The post “Depopulation” cannot stop H5N1, vet reform group & Pacelle warn appeared first on Animals 24-7.