Eggcellent Killings

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More government cement heads in action:

Donald Trump isn’t looking to “buy American” when it comes to restocking eggs in America’s fridges.

The president’s plan to bring down egg prices involves outsourcing the country’s need to three or four other nations by purchasing 70 to 100 million eggs for the American market, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Wednesday.

In an interview with Fox News earlier in the day, Rollins first and foremost blamed the rising egg cost on Biden administration policies, rather than the spread of avian flu, which has practically devastated egg production across the nation. – via yahoo.com

I know you’re probably kicking yourself at not seeing the brilliant solution the Trump administration hatched concerning the egg travesty that’s been foisted upon Americans…by the American government…cull the chickens in America and buy the eggs from countries that don’t kill their chickens as a matter of practice to avoid the avian flu.  Genius!  

Such stunning logical solutions have probably never been heard of before.  Thankfully, as with the Biden administration, (and the ones before his) the Trump administration has the best-of-the-best government pinheads to come up these type of solutions.

Avian flu—which is largely spread by wild fowl—has added incredible strain on American chicken farmers, extinguishing some small businesses overnight as they contend with infection in their roosts. If just one hen tests positive for the H5N1 virus, it could precipitate the preventative deaths of the entire flock.

Why?  

(from an extensive but excellent article from 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

 Spending millions of dollars to kill millions of chickens isn’t working.

The bird flu pandemic has been going on for decades, but it’s only affected poultry, so the cruelty, waste and illogic of the bird flu response has garnered little attention.

With COVID, people who are asymptomatic but test positive are expected to quarantine.

With bird flu, flocks that are asymptomatic but test positive are destroyed en masse.

Joel Salatin, quoted in a recent article by Dr. Joseph Mercola explains why that’s so insane:

“The policy of mass extermination without regard to immunity, without even researching why some birds flourish while all around are dying, is insane. The most fundamental principles of animal husbandry and breeding demand that farmers select for healthy immune systems.” …

The answer is relatively simple. Save birds that survive the infection and breed them. That way, future generations will have natural immunity. “If a flock gets HPAI, let it run its course. It’ll kill the ones it’ll kill but in a few days the survivors will be obvious. Keep those and put them in a breeding program,” Salatin writes.

That’s what Will Harris of White Oak Pastures did. He raises healthy animals outdoors. In a recent video he makes the case that regenerative organic farmers have no reason to fear the bird flu.

Mass killings don’t make a lick of sense, that’s what’s been happening for 25 years as a national program and since the 1980s at the state level.

Since 2000, there’s been a national program to test farmed poultry under the National Poultry Improvement Plan’s “U.S. Avian Influenza Clean” program. There were state programs for universal bird flu testing that predate the national program.

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza was considered a threat to egg, chicken and turkey farming, but HPAI did not exist in the United States, so the program tested for Low Pathogenic Avian Influenza, which caused few or no clinical signs in infected birds. 

Even though they weren’t sick, birds that tested positive for LPAI were culled, based on the idea that the H5/H7 subtypes of low pathogenic avian influenza could mutate into highly pathogenic avian influenza.

An outbreak in 1983–1984 prompted the destruction of more than 17 million birds at a cost of nearly $56 million. The involvement of gain-of-function hall-of-shamer Yoshihiro Kawaoka in this incident and the fact that it predated the politically suspicious 1997 Hong Kong outbreak where there were human bird flu cases suggest that there’s more to this story than most people realized.

In 1996–1997, a number of table-egg farms in Pennsylvania tested positive for an H7N2 avian influenza virus that was nonpathogenic to chickens, but the Pennsylvania Agricultural Department ordered nine flocks to be depopulated.

In 2002, nearly 4 million birds were killed under State and Federal authority in Virginia and Texas due to outbreaks of H7 LPAI (in Virginia) and H5 LPAI (in Texas). The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s APHIS provided compensation to the poultry owners and contract growers at the rate of $10 per bird, spending close to $40 million on the effort.

In 2006, the national test-and-destroy program was expanded from breeding flocks to commercial poultry.

Spending millions of dollars killing millions of otherwise healthy birds every time a flock tested positive for Low Pathogenic Avian Influenza, didn’t keep Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza at bay.

In 2015, HPAI H5 virus outbreaks (including H5N2 and H5N8 viruses) were reported in commercial poultry flocks in 21 US states. According to the inappropriately titled, “When poultry take a sick leave: Response costs for the 2014–2015 highly pathogenic avian influenza epidemic in the USA,” $879 million was spent to kill 51 million birds.

In 2016, 414,000 birds were killed after they tested positive for H7N8 HPAI/LPAI in Indiana.

In 2017, HPAI was found in Tennessee; 253,000 birds with LPAI were killed in four states including Alabama, Kentucky and Georgia.

In 2020, a South Carolina turkey flock with 32,577 birds was destroyed after HPAI was detected.

Killing asymptomatic birds is cruel

In 2021, the Humane Society of the United States, Mercy for Animals and Farm Sanctuary challenged the United States Department of Agriculture’s avian influenza response plan and won a settlement. According to Farm Sanctuary:

USDA’s cruel and irresponsible plan relies on and incentivizes “depopulation” (the mass slaughter of innocent animals) to contain bird flu outbreaks rather than doing anything to address the stressful and overcrowded factory farm conditions that make such outbreaks virtually inevitable. 

The USDA sought to dismiss the lawsuit, but a California federal judge ordered in March 2021 that the case should move forward, and ultimately, the parties were able to reach a settlement. While this victory will not immediately stop the mass killings of birds on factory farms or prevent the agency from spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars bailing out agribusiness when flocks are ‘depopulated,’ it will require USDA to produce an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) addressing the devastating impacts of a plan that involves killing millions of birds and disposing of their bodies in unlined pits or burning them.

We hope the agency will realize the foolishness of its plan and adopt an alternative that seeks to prevent bird flu outbreaks in the first place by addressing the horrendous overcrowded conditions in factory farms, as suggested in our lawsuit. Adopting such an alternative could stop the senseless killing of tens of millions of animals and save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

In January 2023, the USDA published a Notice of Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, but has not yet taken further action. 

Meanwhile, we’re in the midst of the largest ever destruction of flocks in history, which has been ongoing since 2022, with 85.87 million birds killed as of April 10, 2024.

These birds are not dying from the flu. They’re asymptomatic, they’re being massacred and the more birds are killed the more HPAI cases there are.

One hint that this is a scam is that the government and their stenographers in the media never mention how many birds die from the flu versus being killed for testing positive. Since we never hear about birds dying from the flu, we can only assume that all the birds being killed are asymptomatic.

(read more)

Truly, how humanity has made it to the year 2025 in spite of the worst-of-the-worst running the show from generation to generation is like…completely unbelievable.

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Tonight’s musical offering:

Krystian Zimerman – Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E Flat Major, Op. 73: II. Adagio un poco moto – Sir Simon Rattle – London Symphony Orchestra