Then you have a big plume of virus coming from that house that spreads to other poultry houses. The rationale is if the influenza virus spreads so fast that it’ll go through a poultry house really rapidly, all of those birds produce massive amounts of virus in the air. “Nobody wants to see it used, but sometimes it is, as a last resort.
James Roth, director of the Center for Food Security and Public Health at Iowa state university’s college of veterinary medicine and an adviser to the federal government on biosecurity, acknowledged that VSD+ causes more suffering than other forms of culling, but said it is the most efficient means of containing the spread of bird flu because it is relatively swift. Members of another group, Direct Action Everywhere, have disrupted Timberwolves games in recent weeks wearing T-shirts proclaiming “Glen Taylor Roasts Animals Alive”. “Eventually the birds collapse and, finally, die from heat and suffocation,” the group said. “They cooked those birds alive,” said one of the Rembrandt workers involved in the culling.Īn animal rights group, Animal Outlook, used freedom of information laws to obtain records of experiments at North Carolina State University that show that VSD+ causes “extreme suffering” to the hens as they “writhe, gasp, pant, stagger and even throw themselves against the walls of their confinement in a desperate attempt to escape”.
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Photograph: Dan Brouillette/The Guardianīut Tom Cullen of the Iowa newspaper the Storm Lake Times revealed that birds at Rembrandt were culled using a system known as ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+) in which air is closed off to the barns and heat pumped in until the temperature rises above 104F (40C). Oscar Garcia, a former plant supervisor at Rembrandt Foods.
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Chicken farms have previously slaughtered hens en masse by suffocating them with foam or pumping barns full of carbon dioxide, methods that have been criticized as inhumane. Outside criticism of Rembrandt has focused on the method of killing. Then they’re thrown out of work and no one speaks for them.”
“They couldn’t protest because then they’d be fired and lose their redundancy pay. But chickens are chickens, right? People worked in those barns pulling out dead birds in terrible conditions, faeces everywhere, doing 12- or 14-hour days.
“We get it: it was really inhumane the way they killed them. “Right now everybody’s worried about the chickens,” said Oscar Garcia, a former supervisor at the plant. Others fired from the plant contrast the seriousness with which the bird flu outbreak has been taken by Rembrandt’s management to what they describe as the company’s lax approach to the threat to workers from Covid, as it swept through factory farms and slaughterhouses in Iowa and elsewhere. But few voices have been raised in support of Rembrandt’s workers, some of them undocumented migrants.
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In the weeks that followed, animal rights protesters targeted Rembrandt’s billionaire owner, Glen Taylor, over the cull, including disrupting games played by the professional basketball team he owns, the Minnesota Timberwolves. The killing over, about 250 people were summarily thrown out of work with just a few dozen skeleton staff remaining. Workers spent nearly a month pulling the dead poultry from the cages and dumping them in carts before they were piled high in nearby fields and buried in huge pits. The slaughter of 5.3m hens at Rembrandt is the largest culling at any factory farm in the country. More than 22m birds have been killed in an attempt to contain the outbreak – the majority in Iowa, the US’s biggest producer of eggs. The culling has been repeated at chicken and turkey farms across Iowa and 28 other states from Maine to Utah.
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