Good morning! Taro is out on a walk and seems to have found a nice, warm spot. It’s a beautiful day, and the birds are singing all around us.
Today I’d like to talk a little about bird flu (avian influenza).
Lots of birds, but no bird flu news
Lots of seabirds fly to Hawaii from all sorts of places, stay for the winter, and leave again, so birds come and go here quite a lot. Even so, I’ve hardly ever heard any news about bird flu here.
When a dead seabird or other wild bird from outside is found, people from a government agency collect it and test it for avian influenza — every time. As far as I know, there has never been a positive result, so most people here think of Hawaii as having no bird flu.
How chickens are kept in Hawaii
On top of that, there are only four or five poultry farms in Hawaii with more than 3,000 birds, and those larger farms are all floor-raised, with the chickens walking around freely. One keeps them inside a building rather than outdoors, but even that is a fairly roomy floor system. (Nice, right, Monarch? We live somewhere even better. “I know that already.”)
There’s no cage farming here, with chickens packed into small stacked cages over mountains of poop. Hawaii’s farms vaccinate for a cold-like illness unrelated to bird flu and for one nerve disease, and since the birds aren’t crammed together, even colds don’t spread much.
Ordinary colds do go around among our own chickens. Just like people, some catch them easily and some don’t: the weaker ones can be hit hard, while the strong ones look completely fine.
Thinking about culling
I’ve never seen news of farms here culling their birds because of bird flu. It has probably never happened, so everyone is a bit hazy about how it would even be handled — and without the disease, there’s no need for it.
But I saw news from Japan that so many chickens had been culled that egg prices went up visibly, and our Glico is sad about it. “What does ‘cull’ mean?” You don’t need to know.
I started with one chicken and slowly kept more, and the more I have, the more I feel it: chickens are very smart, very social, and much closer to us than people think. I hope sad events like these — keeping huge numbers, making them sick and killing them in huge numbers, for people’s own convenience — will disappear. I think we should take a fresh look at whether culling is really the right thing to do.
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii. See you next time!