Misguided and misdirected response resulted in mass killing of animals and creating conditions for viral spillover to human beings
Pierre, S.D. — Two veterinarians — each with career-long experience in animal agriculture and with additional academic training and professional experience in public health and infectious disease response — leveled detailed criticisms at top officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a “bungled response” to the H5N1 outbreak. They called the federal agency’s work in this space “timid and misdirected in so many ways” and “overreaching and misguided in other ways.”
“The USDA has been too slow to undertake critical tasks, and it’s been too muted on key prevention strategies, focusing its personnel and its resources on multi-billion-dollar mass depopulation strategies for poultry,” said Dr. Jim Keen, D.V.M., Ph.D., director of veterinary sciences with the Center for a Humane Economy. “It’s not a sustainable or strategic response. We have an H5N1 epidemic that’s been running rampant for nearly three years, with no end in sight, and the USDA is treating H5N1 like a foreign disease that it can stamp out. They have it wrong on the basics.”
While acknowledging that control of bird flu H5N1 is challenging, Keen is critical of the agency’s focus on poultry depopulation, mainly 100 million laying hens, by swamping the animals with firefighting foam and suffocating them or by using “ventilation shutdown,” where birds are killed by halting air flow into a poultry house and then turning up the heat and introducing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to asphyxiate or “cook alive” the animals.
He argues not only that the mass killing is demonstrably inhumane, but that it also may be achieving nothing more than a reduction in the U.S. laying hen population, resulting in diminished production, a surge in prices of this food staple of the American diet, and a billion-dollar outlay from taxpayers to indemnify farmers.
A former USDA research scientist and faculty member of the University of Nebraska School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Dr. Keen specializes in emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases of farmed animals. He has broad field experience in outbreak investigation and animal disease control including enteric zoonotic bacteria from livestock in the United States, Foot and Mouth Disease in the United Kingdom, and African Swine Fever in the Caucasus, and virulent Newcastle Disease in the United States.
“Crisis response and disease containment are essential features of any response to a zoonotic disease that has spillover potential to humans,” said Colonel Tom Pool, D.V.M, MPH, Dipl. ACVPM, senior veterinarian with Animal Wellness Action and the former leader of the U.S. Army Veterinary Command. “But with the virus thriving on animal-to-animal transmission pathways, it is foolish for the USDA to ignore the 20 million fighting birds being trafficked across the United States and imported and exported to our country.”
Dr. Pool added, “Cockfighting birds were responsible for two-thirds of all U.S. outbreaks of virulent Newcastle disease, a dangerous viral poultry disease very similar to bird flu. It is axiomatic that trafficking and smuggling of fighting birds constitute extreme risk for our poultry industry, especially when so many non-nationals working in our poultry houses hail from countries that allow cockfighting.”
Dr. Pool said it is reckless for the USDA not to say a word about the “backyard flocks” it has depopulated, because there are so many reasons people might have birds in their possession. “If we had data from the USDA, we could then light a fire under enforcement officials to address illegal possession and trafficking of fighting birds,” he observed.
Dr. Pool earned his Master’s in public health (tropical medicine) degree from Harvard University, and doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Oklahoma State University. Colonel Pool was commander of the U.S. Army Veterinary Command before serving as Territorial Veterinarian for the U.S. Territory of Guam. While serving the Department of Agriculture in Guam, he noted that nearly 12,000 fighting birds were shipped to Guam in a five-year period in violation of federal law. He has authored peer-reviewed publications on leptospirosis and dengue hemorrhagic fever.
“While there’s little we can do to stop wild birds from shedding the virus to hosts along the migratory flyways, there is something we can do about widespread transmission of the virus by cockfighters,” added Dr. Pool. “We can shut down their operations and arrest the people involved, thereby reducing risks to our commercial flocks and other keepers of poultry.”
Since bird flu was detected in our homeland in February 2022, government authorities, mainly at the USDA, have ordered the killing of 130.3 million poultry on 623 commercial poultry farms and 753 “backyard farms” in all 50 states. 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 $9 in some places.
The bird flu virus also mutated, enabling it to spill over to dairy cattle in early 2024. It has so far infected at least 919 dairy herds in 16 states (perhaps a million cows, out of a national population of nine million), causing widespread suffering of the cows. This has also caused widespread bird flu virus contamination of the on-farm and raw milk supply.
Wild animals are also afflicted and dying in unknown numbers. There have been 10,922 fatal detections of the bird flu H5N1 strain in at least 185 wild avian species in all 50 states, mostly waterfowl and birds of prey. Bird flu H5N1 has also killed at least 419 wild carnivores or marine mammals of 25 species. Feral domesticated cats and wild big cats are especially vulnerable, with 20 captive mountain lions, bobcats, and other big cats perishing at the Wild Felid Advocacy Center of Washington. Total wild animal deaths certainly number in the millions.
The two veterinarians recommended the following course corrections for the USDA, in anticipation of a leadership change at the agency.
- INCREASED TRANSPARENCY AND REPORTING. The USDA must be more transparent about disease discovery and disclose the types of flocks that are harboring disease. 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, to say nothing of future movement of the virus. Working with the World Health Organization, the USDA should create a unique and separate category for premises with cockfighting birds, rather than pooling them with all “backyard poultry.” 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.
- PREVENTION. The USDA must advocate for a crackdown on rampant cockfighting. We know cockfighting played a central role in the spread bird flu in Asia among poultry and people since that outbreak in 1997, and there’s no reason to think that the same thing isn’t happening here given that the United States has perhaps as many as 20 million fighting birds spread across thousands of backyard gamecock farms, which traffic birds domestically and to foreign destinations.
- REDUCING RELIANCE ON MASS DEPOPULATION STRATEGIES. The USDA must stop ventilation shutdown as a killing strategy, except in extreme cases. This mass killing is demonstrably inhumane, but it’s also not helping arrest bird flu spread. After three years, the outlay of $2 billion, and 130 million dead poultry, perhaps the USDA should accept that bird flu H5N1 is no longer a “foreign animal disease.” 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. USDA is not depopulating dairy cow herds but using a quarantine and herd immunity strategy. The same quarantine and natural acquired immunity approach, or possibly H5 vaccination, should be evaluated in poultry in the field.
Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, said that addressing live-wildlife markets and reckless animal tests in laboratories in Wuhan were critical features of the response to SARS-CoV-2.
“How do our authorities fail to look at transmission pathways grounded on the mistreatment of animals? Cockfighting is a crime, and we have tools now to stop illegal animal trafficking from accelerating the H5N1 crisis,” Pacelle observed.
“The use of firefighting foam and cooking birds in giant hen houses raises very basic questions about animal care,” he added. “These questions become even more relevant when the wisdom of mass depopulation strategies is so suspect.”