The USDA MUST Change Its Approach to Bird Flu

The USDA’s response to the H5N1 crisis continues to be, in a word, a disaster.

Bungled. Expensive. Deadly. And not protective of the American public.

It’s a performance that should raise the hackles of every American, whether they care about animal welfare, their own health and safety, or the price of eggs.

Today, we are sending a grievance letter to USDA nominee Brooke Rollins. The agency is killing commercially raised and backyard birds at an extraordinary rate by especially inhumane means, exploding consumer prices for eggs and other food staples, and doing very little of value to stop the spread of an adaptive and dangerous disease that is at work in 50 states and has more than a little potential to morph into the agent to drive the next human pandemic. You can read the letter here.

During the past two weeks, the USDA has been killing a million birds every day! These birds are dying in the worst of ways, even beyond the miseries and inevitable doom they experience on factory farms.

It is a toll both eye-popping and deeply saddening. It’s the USDA, not H5N1, that has done most of the killing of the 150 million animals who have perished since the virus began its search for animal hosts three years ago.

The USDA is suffocating birds in carts with carbon dioxide, burying them in firefighter foam, or subjecting them to ventilation shutdown (VSD). VSD entails turning off all supply inlets and exhaust outlets, heating the building to 104⁰F, and sometimes injecting CO₂ gas into the building. VSD is used, for example, in large laying houses that may contain more than 300,000 hens per building.

An owner of a pheasant flock in Jefferson County, Wisc., reported that the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the USDA killed 188,000 pheasants by drowning them in a water-filled ditch. I watched an interview with a duck farmer on CBS Sunday Morning who was in tears because the USDA wiped out his flock of 100,000 of birds on his Long Island Farm.

USDA Has It Wrong on So Many Fronts

At times, the USDA’s response has been timid and incomplete. And in other ways, it has been overreaching and reckless.

As I wrote in our letter to Rollins, in cooperation with our agricultural veterinarians Jim Keen, DVM, PhD, and Tom Pool, DVM, MPH, the USDA is getting it wrong on multiple fronts.

• APHIS is wrongly treating bird flu H5N1 as a “foreign animal disease” and using a “stamp out” strategy that has resulted in 150 million dead birds, most of them laying hens in the egg industry. The disease is now endemic, with the H5N1 strain infecting at least 485 wild bird species, and the USDA needs to wake up to that reality. 

• APHIS is choosing mass killing over vaccination. France and Mexico are vaccinating, and the only practical reason the USDA is not choosing vaccination is to coddle key exporters players in the chicken meat industry (broiler birds).
  
  
• APHIS has been completely non-transparent in its investigations into infected commercial or “backyard bird” flocks. For example, cockfighting activity is a known and substantial risk factor for bird flu H5N1 introduction, global spread, and human zoonotic infections. The USDA is not disclosing the number of cockfighting flocks it’s depopulated, masking a potential source of spread of the disease.
  
  
• APHIS is conducting depopulation activities at odds with any basic respect for animal welfare norms.

We cannot kill our way out of the crisis.

Incoming Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins needs to restrain and retrain the people at the USDA. The agency should have a “stamp out” strategy with cockfighting, not the U.S. laying hen industry.

The agency has not pursued vaccination, largely because the National Chicken Council has urged the agency not to pursue that strategy. It is trying to ensure that its $7.24 billion dark meat export market is not disrupted, even as all hell breaks loose elsewhere.

But consumers will soon have paid more than $20 billion in higher egg prices, tripling the total value of this export market (which will certainly stay intact if vaccination is implemented)! And that says nothing of the $2 billion and counting that the government is drawing from taxpayers to indemnify farmers for the mass killing of their birds. The virus has been discovered in all 50 states and it is not slowing its movements.

Mexico and France have successfully vaccinated their poultry flocks against bird flu since 2023, greatly decreasing the impact of the epidemics in those two major agricultural nations. Mexico’s agriculture department and its health agency are running circles around the American agencies in effectiveness and cost-consciousness.

USDA Should Stamp Out Cockfighting, Not Birds Used in Agriculture

Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy have documented that there are tens of thousands of gamecock farms in the U.S. raising birds for fighting in domestic and foreign fighting pits. Even the USDA previously cited that there are 20 million backyard fighting birds in our homeland.

This is relevant because cockfighting activity is a known and substantial risk factor for avian disease spread, including bird flu. We also know that cockfighting has been a primary agent of spread for the second most significant avian poultry disease — virulent Newcastle Disease (vND). The smuggling of cockfighting birds from Mexico was the cause of 10 of 15 outbreaks in the United States of vND.

Cockfighting has the potential to spread the disease not only farther and wider, but to allow the virus to reassort and become more transmissible and deadly to humans. Some observers have said that H5N1 has the potential to make COVID-19 look like the sniffles, if a worst-case scenario develops.

In our letter to Brooke Rollins, we are urging her to put a stop to the USDA kill-them-all approach and embrace these strategies and tenets:

• Prevention: Immediately institute strategic bird flu vaccination of high-risk commercial flocks and advocate for a crackdown on rampant cockfighting.

• Reporting and transparency: The USDA must be more transparent about disease discovery and disclose the types of flocks that are harboring disease.

• De-emphasize depopulation strategies: The USDA must stop ventilation shutdown as a killing strategy, except in extreme cases, as a matter of food security and humane treatment.

It’s also time for Congress to step off the sidelines and help with a course correction. There are plenty of reasons for Congress to intervene: higher food prices for staples, agriculture upended, and taxpayers getting it on both ends.

Please support our work to redirect our federal government on this animal health crisis that has the potential to morph into a human health epidemic. And to address one aspect of this crisis, urge your lawmakers to pass the FIGHT Act right away so that we can see a proper crackdown on cockfighting and reduce the risk of spreading H5N1 more widely in the United States and abroad.