Growing up in Northern California’s rural agriculture country, like all kids in my neighborhood, I was a member of 4-H. I learned how to raise goats, spin wool, work with horses and show dogs. One of the most important lessons we learned was that good animal stewardship meant providing your animals with food, water, shelter, a life worth living, and a quick and painless death. If your animals became sick, you had a duty to take care of them. Honoring that responsibility was the least we could do for the animals we benefited from and who had no choice in the matter. Treating animals poorly reflected poorly on your character and would hurt your business, too.
Today, animals raised in modern intensive facilities are kept hidden away from public view. Corporations are no longer beholden to the same moral code I grew up with. Production efficiency takes precedence above animal stewardship, and callousness towards animals, the community and the environment is rewarded instead.
The recent outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza has brought the modern industry’s sociopathy to light. When animals get sick, the methods used to end their lives, while expedient for the corporation, cause prolonged suffering for the animals.
Recently, a Petaluma cage-free egg producer, known for touting their high welfare practices, resorted to ending the lives of their birds by sealing up in buildings and pumping in heat until the birds inside eventually die of heatstroke, in a process known as ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+). It is as bad as it sounds. All species experience similar effects of heat stroke, including shock, gastrointestinal bleeding and sloughing, vomiting, respiratory distress, organ damage, and internal bleeding. But birds have an anatomic cooling system called the rete mirabile ophthalmicum that protects the brain from increases in body temperature, meaning that they suffer for a prolonged period of time from the effects of the heat without losing consciousness.
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Yet we bail out wealthy producers — whether we buy from their businesses or not. Since 2022, more than $715 million has gone to bail out companies that lost birds to avian influenza, including many that killed their birds using VSD+. Jennie-O Turkey Store received more than $85 million in bird flu bailout money while their parent company, Hormel Foods, recorded net sales surpassing $12.1 billion in 2023. Tyson Foods took more than $29 million while CEO Donnie King received more than $13 million in compensation. The top 10 companies took over 41% of the total indemnity payments, and many of them failed to put plans in place to use less cruel, American Veterinary Medical Association “Preferred” methods of ending the lives of their animals.
These production practices not only harm animals, they perpetuate an ever-escalating arms race against nature that threatens the health of our own species and might even cause the next pandemic. Recent work out of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health explains how “high-density livestock operations can serve as an opportune environment for spillover from wild animals into livestock or as incubators for pandemic influenza strains. … Large pig and poultry farms are where the genetic re-assortment needed to source pandemic influenza strains may most likely occur.” Yet, we incentivize the companies that create such conditions.
The mass killing of animals via heatstroke should not be accepted as an unchangeable fact. We must stop incentivizing sociopathy and cruelty and instead support slaughter-free farmers and businesses that embody the values current intensive slaughter-based production systems lack: responsibility and compassion. It isn’t just selfless, though. It turns out that by protecting the animals, we protect our own species, too.
Dr. Crystal Heath is a veterinarian from Berkeley and executive director of Our Honor, a non-profit organization that supports animal professionals in advancing ethical policies.