BIRD FLU: WHY?

Why bird flu?  Why now?

                  Ever since the covid debacle, I've become dubious of ANYTHING the government says--er, way MORE dubious.  The official narrative is wrong 90 percent of the time.

                  So a bunch of things suddenly fell into place for me today when one of our staff, who just returned from visiting family in Michigan, came with stories of signs over vacant egg shelves in the supermarket saying: "Egg shortage due to cage free chicken production."    She didn't have pictures; I'm hoping someone reading this blog can take some pictures.

                  I'm not sure she quoted the signs exactly right, but it brings to mind conversations I had several years ago when Burger King announced that within 10 years they would use only cage-free eggs.  The food writer for the Washington Post called me to get my comments about such an earth-shattering announcement.  Of course, she assumed I'd be thrilled and have all kinds of wonderful things to say about it.

                  My response was "why 10 years?  We have a Burger King 15 minutes from our farm; we could supply cage-free eggs today.  In fact, we can do even better and offer pastured GMO-free, vaccine-free eggs right now.  Why the long runway?"

                  I began doing some sleuthing on the issue, talking to folks friendly to the industry.  They were quite surprised at my naivete.  "Don't you realize the plan?  The long runway is to give time for the industry to prove the superiority of caged hens so they don't have to go to cage-free. "  Industry folks were adamant, and are right now, that caged birds are healthier than cage-free. And they will fight tooth and nail to keep caged production systems.

                  It actually makes sense.  Cage-free means the birds live in and on their poop and stir up far more fecal dust to inhale.  Caged birds, although they can't move around, at least don't live on their poop and don't have fecal bedding to stir up and create pathogenic dust.  The industry position is that cage-free is harmful to laying hens, period.  And the industry has a lot of money tied up in caged infrastructure, from housing to egg collection to feed distribution.  That's the train, and it doesn't like to be derailed.

                  Those old conversations from several years ago suddenly popped into my mind when I learned today that supermarkets are putting up signage blaming cage-free chickens for the bird flu.  "See, we told you, you dimwit animal welfare folks.  You're such idiots and now your cage-free rules and prejudices are destroying the egg industry." This could be a great win for the caged laying hen industry.

                  Could it be that the entire bird flu epizootic is an industry plan to discredit cage-free eggs and tilt the public toward caged laying hens?  Is that possible?