Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Gassing Chickens

6000 chickens are going to be gassed today "as part of an exercise to test Ireland's preparedness for a bird flu outbreak". Huh? Would they not know it the gas works by killing 60 or 600 chickens. 6000 seems like, pardon the pun, overkill. Will the gassed chickens be fit for human consumption or will they just be discarded? I'm not an animal rights nut, I just hate to see 6000 healthy chickens being wasted.

Also I don't think our ability to kill chickens will be the deciding factor in stopping the spread of any bird flu outbreak, I'd rather see them trialing ways to keep free range flocks away from wild birds, disinfectant routines for people accessing infected farms, or procedures to monitor mysterious bird fatalities.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

That is a weird way to test their eqipment. I'm not an animal rights activist either, but gassing so many perfectly good chickens seems wasteful.
To me, the bird flu issue is over-hyped. There has still never been a human to human transmission of the disease, so I really don't see how there could be a massive outbreak of the disease, especially if infected birds are taken out of the picture.