Factory farming toll rises in Asia, from ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

 

 

Editorial: Factory farming toll rises in Asia

 

" We are preparing to campaign against burying birds with

influenza alive, " Voice-4-Animals founder Changkil Park e-mailed

from Seoul, South Korea, as the winter avian flu pandemic peaked,

and frantic officials and poultry workers struggled to contain it by

killing all the birds believed to be at risk. " I hope animal people

will have some ideas for us about how animal advocates should view

the massive inhumane treatment of birds, " Changkil Park added,

seeming to speak for thousands whose feelings ranged from shock to

despair.

Finding any good in the often unspeakably cruel culling of

more than 100 million chickens and other birds is admittedly

difficult.

The World Bank has pledged to finance rebuilding the

Southeast Asian poultry industry, moreover, which will probably

mean even more intensive promotion of factory farm methods in the

very near future. If Southeast Asian egg producers adopt the routine

live maceration or burial of " spent " hens that has become standard in

U.S. agribusiness, described elsewhere in this edition, the World

Bank involvement may help to institutionalize some of the cruelty

that is now horrifying television news viewers throughout the world.

Along with the bad news about birds have come reports from

Vietnam and Guangdong province, China, that dog consumption

increased during the avian flu plague. This is not because consumers

who could barely afford to eat chicken once a week are now eating

dogs instead. Rather, the relatively small numbers of Vietnamese

and Guangdonians who can afford to eat dogs are apparently eating

more, in the misguided hope that dog meat might fortify them against

the deadly H5N1 flu virus variant.

Despite the bad news, however, there is cause for cautious

hope in many aspects of the epidemic. At the very least the avian

flu outbreaks vindicate animal advocates in opposition to factory

farming, which incubated H5N1, and cockfighting, which helped to

spread it, and reinforces virtually every argument for vegetarianism.

Most significantly, many Southeast Asian leaders, news

media, and ordinary citizens have acknowledged emotional distress

over the bird-killing itself, as well as about the huge economic

losses from it. Some prominent officials have openly grieved for the

birds, or at least specific pet birds. Some have put their careers

and possibly their lives on the line to protect wildlife against mob

killing, spilling over from attacks on nearby factory farms.

Even while defending the culling as essential to protect

public health, and noting that failed agricultural vaccination

apparently helped to create H5N1, countless Southeast Asians have

voiced the thought that there must be a better way to save human

lives and livelihoods, if only they could find it.

The avian flu pandemic of 2003-2004 will almost certainly not

be the pivotal event that turns Southeast Asia and the world away

from cruelly exploiting and eating chickens at a rate of consumption

ten times greater than for all other warm-blooded animals combined.

Yet it may become a landmark event in bringing about policy-level

reconsideration of linking human food security as closely to factory

farming as has occurred during the past half century.

The rapid spread of avian flu in many forms among the poultry

flocks of at least 12 nations shows again, on the biggest scale so

far, that factory farming is inherently unhealthy for both the

animals involved and the people who work with them and eat them.

Under political, economic, and cultural pressure to provide " a

chicken in every pot, " decision-makers at every level are trying to

duck that reality. Every method from genetic engineering to killing

animals with early stone age weapons has already been deployed to try

to save factory farming --and not jus tlately. Authorities around

the world have killed livestock by the millions at least seven times

to control disease linked to factory farming since the 1996 British

discovery that mad cow disease can cause the inevitably fatal

Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease in humans.

In Southeast Asia alone, Taiwan killed 3.8 million pigs,

sheep, and cattle in 1997 due to hoof-and-mouth disease. Hong Kong

killed 1.5 million poultry and caged pet birds in Hong Kong in

January 1998, after H5N1 was first identified as a killer of human

children. Malaysia killed 800,000 pigs in 1999 to try to eradicate

the Nipah virus. Also a killer of children, Nipah virus is now known

to have crossed into pigs from fruit bats, after rainforest logging

and fires drove the bats into closer proximity to pigs in quest of

food. Nipah virus became epidemic when it encounted pigs who were

raised in huge concentrations.

Then came Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2002-2003,

killing more than 900 people worldwide, mostly in China and Vietnam.

The high-volume killing undertaken in response to each

disease outbreak is not only to protect enormous investments in

infrastructure, though certainly that is a major motivation,

especially when the disease, like hoof-and-mouth, is not

potentially deadly to humans. Factory farming is also seen as

essential to food production, both in the U.S. and Europe, where

fewer than one person in 20 works in agriculture, and in Southeast

Asia, where less than 50 years ago famines killed more than 20

million Chinese.

Vegetarians typically are aware that beans and tofu made from

soy beans could supply the protein needs of all the world with just a

fraction of the use of land, water, and other resources that now go

into producing meat, but much that well-informed vegetarians mistake

for common knowledge is still unknown to almost everyone else. Soy

beans are native to Southeast Asia and tofu was invented there, yet

the technology and commercial production methods that are

increasingly establishing soy and tofu as U.S. and European dietary

stables are not yet widely known or used in most of Asia, Africa,

and Latin America.

An increasingly wide opportunity is developing in Southeast

Asia to help demonstrate the potential of vegetarianism, embraced by

choice, to people who might welcome an alternative to factory

farming if they understood that " no meat " and " no hunger " can be

complimentary ways of life.

The cultural legacy of vegetarianism in much of Southeast

Asia has long been associated with religious asceticism and

renunciation of worldly things, as among the vegetarian followers of

Isaiah, John the Baptist, Jesus, and St. Francis. The choice of

Buddhist and Hindu monks and nuns to be vegetarian has often been

misinterpreted by meat-eaters as representing an altruistic choice by

the holy to leave their share of animal products to others in greater

need. Thus there has not been much recognition that vegetarianism,

associated by most people with deprivation of meat, can in truth be

a choice of abundance.

The argument that vegetarianism enhances personal health has

meanwhile been reinforced by the evidence that meat-eating dependent

upon raising animals in unnatural concentrations is adverse to public

health--especially in Guangdong, where the four deadliest flu

epidemics in recorded history emerged in 1918, 1957, 1968, and

1977. The argument for the collective benefit resulting from

vegetarianism could have especially strong resonance in

Confucian-influenced societies, which emphasize acting for the

collective good.

 

Fear and guilt

 

Migratory wild birds have carried countless avian flu strains

for millennia. Southeast Asia, attracting by far the greatest

congregations of migratory birds in the world, with a warm, moist

climate that makes every swamp a viral incubator, is the global flu

hub. Every form of flu originated as an avian disease. Most strains

afflicting humans have come to us through domestic livestock, usually

with pigs as intermediary between poultry and people.

Yet with a few dramatic exceptions such as the global flu

epidemic of 1918, the most deadly avian flus have rarely spread far,

or fast, because until factory farming was introduced to southern

China as part of forced modernization under Mao tse Tung, sick wild

birds seldom fell or left their droppings where tens of thousands of

stressed domestic animals with already weakened immune systems could

become carriers overnight.

The avian flu outbreaks in Southeast Asia and the smaller

outbreaks of less threatening strains in the mid-Atlantic states of

the U.S. have in common that they exploded after the viruses came

into contact with unnatural concentrations of chickens, ducks, and

geese.

Certainly various avian flu strains including the deadly H5N1

strain soon attacked small free-roaming flocks of domestic birds as

well, especially in Vietnam. Even in Vietnam, however, H5N1

appears to have hit factory farms first, by many weeks, before

infecting the relatively scattered and isolated small flocks.

The usual mechanism by which the virus spread into small

flocks appears to have been the transport and exchange of birds in

connection with cockfighting--a traditional pastime of undereducated

rural poor people on every continent, typically also associated with

gambling, drug abuse, and organized crime.

That link, like the parallels in the Southeast Asian

bird-killing to standard U.S. practice, is further explored

elsewhere in this edition.

Meanwhile, animal advocates must recognize through feelings of

understandable horror, anger, and depression at how more than 100

million birds were killed that the cruelty associated with it appears

to have been driven almost entirely by panic and lack of readily

apparent alternatives, in societies with low literacy and little

awareness of how to prevent disease, but enduring fear of epidemics.

The rest of the world was relatively unaffected by the killer

flus of 1957, 1968, and 1977, but the wretched deaths of whole

villages and urban neighborhoods were among the formative memories of

many people now in Southeast Asian leadership positions.

H5N1 kills children, with a death rate of 78% among known

cases. For several decades both governments and nonprofit agencies

have sought fairly successfully to curb birth rates in rural

Southeast Asia with the promise that modern medicine can ensure that

enough children from small families will survive to adulthood that

their parents need not fear destitution if they focus their resources

on birthing and raising just one or two offspring.

When a disease sweeps through that strikes mainly children

and makes modern medicine look helpless, panic is not only

predictable but inevitable.

Birds were gassed and then buried or burned where the

technology to gas them was available, but were merely buried alive

with heavy machinery at most sites. The World Health Organization

estimated that as many as 15,000 people inadvertently exposed

themselves to H5N1 in Vietnam alone during hasty efforts to cull

chickens without adequate equipment. Across Southeast Asia desperate

people who lacked other means of quickly killing and disposing of

chickens while minimizing direct contact often resorted to burning

chickens alive.

Misplaced faith in fire as a cheap purgative was most evident

in Bali, Indonesia. As many as 4.7 million chickens died from H5N1

during a six-month official pretense that the epidemic was not avian

flu. After weeks of further chicken deaths while promised

government culls amounted mostly to gruesome photo-ops, officials

burned 228,000 chickens alive on February 6, amid erroneous rumors

that children were dying. The next day the Hindu hamlets of

Bolangan, Utu, and Senganan, near the epi-center of the H5N1

outbreak, burned another 2,500 infected chickens as part of a

" Pecaruan Durmanggala purification ritual. "

" The ritual is aimed at purifying and cleansing the areas

from the evil impact of avian influenza, " a temple priest explained

to Wahyoe Boediwardhana of the Jakarta Post.

The horror of the mass killings, by whatever means, cannot

be understated.

Almost immediately after the chicken burials and burnings in

Thailand, many of the participants prayed for forgiveness of the

suffering that they had inflicted on the chickens. Political leaders

organized and funded the ceremonies.

Such rites are held to relieve human angst. They do nothing

for the animals, and often reek of hypocrisy, as when the Dalai

Lama led services for the pigs who were killed in Taiwan in 1997. " Be

kind to animals " was barely discernible, if at all, among his

messages.

Yet some comparisons of attitude are in order.

Religious figures have conducted similar rites for the

millions of animals who were killed in Britain during the past decade

to control mad cow disease and hoof-and-mouth disease. Few if any of

the slaughter participants have been reported among the worshippers.

ANIMAL PEOPLE is unaware of anyone seeking divine forgiveness

for killing animals en masse to control disease in the U.S.

A cynical view of the Thai rituals might hold that the

worshippers were only relearning the use of religion to excuse

atrocity. Yet the exercise of seeking forgiveness begins by

confessing that whatever was done was wrong, even if the offender

meant no evil and did not know what else to do in a crisis. It is

not to be confused with indifference or denial.

Rising with the smoke from joss sticks and smouldering

chicken carcasses may be growing recognition that factory farming

should not be part of the future direction of Southeast Asia--and the

world. Animal advocates, by making our voices heard, have an

unparalleled opportunity, indeed an obligation, to encourage and

amplify this perspective.

 

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Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

Postal mailing address: P.O. Box 960, Clinton WA 98236 U.S.A.

CORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS IS: <ANPEOPLE

Website: http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/ with French and Spanish

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