Musings from The Lunatic Farmer: BEAK MASKS

by Joel Salatin

As avian influenza runs through the nation’s poultry flocks, with the current extermination of about 28 million laying hens and turkeys, I can’t help but wonder why we aren’t putting beak masks on the chickens.

             If masks are so effective against viruses in the human population, why don’t we just make a chicken mask to stop this virus?  Seems like a better fix than exterminating all these animals.

             The problem is that Dr. Fauci isn’t in the chicken business.  Rats.  What a shame.  If only he were in charge of chickens, he’d have this thing under control in a day.  I think we need to expand his authority to the animals of America so he can take care of them like he’s taken care of the humans of America.

             When avian flu broke out in our part of Virginia many years ago, two of the federal veterinarians sent in to exterminate chickens visited me just to chat.  The independent visits shared an identical assessment:  too many chickens crammed in too tight a space in too small a geographic area.  Both said if they mentioned that publicly they would be fired.

             Hmmmm, I wonder if decentralization of poultry would be better than centralization.  Notice that on one farm, 5.8 million laying hens were destroyed—ON ONE FARM!     

             It’s all blamed on wildlife.  Folks, whenever a culture views wildlife as a liability rather than asset, you know everything is wonky.  It’s like blaming babies for drug addiction.  Or blaming churches for drunkards.  When wildlife is the enemy, something is out of whack in the culture’s thinking.

             I don’t trust the tests.  I don’t trust the experts.  I don’t trust the bureaucrats.  Isn’t it amazing that as a culture, we’re fixated on prolonging human life for a week or two with ultra-expensive, painful, and invasive intervention but at the first sign of sniffles in a chicken, the “only” cure, according to the experts, is mass extermination.  Perhaps the wrong beings are being exterminated.  Just sayin’.

             The biggest tragedy is that these government gumshoes will come onto a property, without a warrant and unannounced, demanding to pull blood from pastured chickens.  They’ll take that sample to a lab driven by political agendas and industrial paradigms (chickens locked in houses are healthier than chickens roaming on a pasture) to determine positive or negative. 

             Does this sound like incestuous fraternal collusion shenanigans to you?

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