Bird flu is surging again. We failed to prepare, and now animals are paying the price.

Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.

As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
      53·
      1 year ago

      I don’t get how you can live with this attitude and not be suicidal. Shit’s gonna get bad, hundreds of millions of people are gonna die if we’re lucky, but to think the human race has no future? That’s past advanced pessimism

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        31·
        1 year ago

        Everyone dies eventually, that’s always been the case. I don’t get why you think seeing a high chance of a particular death down the line should make people instead want death immediately. Frankly, it’s kinda pathetic that you think that’s a logical line of thought. Shit’s going to get so bad humanity might not make it, so we should all just give up?

        Personally, it makes me appreciate this life even more. I might be seeing humanity’s peak, which is a pretty cool time to be alive, and maybe there won’t be many more chances to experience human life. Good or bad, that’s all this is: an experience. It might be the only one we get and will inevitably end at some point anyways, so why rush that ending?

        • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          1 year ago

          Obviously everyone’s gonna die, but laughing at the idea that future generations won’t exist that there is no future, just sounds miserable.

      • daltotron@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        nah, I think it’s kind of a way to get rid of pessimism. it’s easier for a lot of people to conceive of humanity as just being completely dead, rather than conceiving of a humanity that persists on the face of the earth, enduring the wrath of their progenitors, condemned to a future of pain and misery for as long as the sun still burns. that scenario makes you actively, not only want to kill yourself, but maybe also [redacted] in the process, because the tradeoff seems not so bad, then. if only everyone on the earth was punished for their pride, maybe that, we could all live with, in our sort of, myopic first world “extending the guilt out to the guy in cuba or rural africa who hasn’t done shit wrong but will disproportionately be the victim of the decisions of like 5 hollow puppets at the top of power” sort of way. but of the humanity that suffers indefinitely into the future? that’s kind of harder to grapple with.

        so I end up having to not really buy into either as a matter of retaining my own sanity.

      • Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works
        11·
        1 year ago

        I don’t do nonsense like “optimism’” or “pessimism.” I’ll stick to facts an solutions. If there be any left it would be by Richard Stallman and FOSS AI.

        • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          1 year ago

          future

          LMFAO

          There will be none. Not for anything alive from here.

          Where are the “facts and solutions” in this? That’s textbook pessimism. Like, googling “define pessimism” gives you “a lack of hope or confidence in the future.”

          • Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works
            12·
            1 year ago

            I’m not pessimistic. I know these things. I don’t fuck around with brainwashing like “optimism” either. I’ll deal with facts and you and your religious cult can fuck off with “hope.”. I’d say bullshit but mushrooms actually heal. Even the Death God won’t be back for your fucking ignorance.

            Let’s stop that with prohibition. rolls eyes

      • Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works
        11·
        1 year ago

        You don’t understand that this is the exact objective of the patriarchy. Corporations and greedy are just scheme of distraction and disbelieve upon their collective suicide.