BACKYARD POULTRY VECTOR FOR SALMONELLA
By now you've all probably seen the news reports that we have a big outbreak of salmonella going on due to backyard ducks and chickens. When the grocery store shelves went empty, thousands of families decided to become more self-reliant and get a backyard flock of poultry.
Unfortunately, the data does not distinguish between chickens and ducks so we have no way of knowing how many of these cases are ducks versus chickens. That's a shame because the difference is profound. Ducks love water and don't scratch. That means they tend to be sloppy around their water source. Their slopped water and manure combine on the ground surface rather than being scratched in.
Ducks eat far more grass so they denude their space quicker. Their manure is runnier than chicken, which makes it smear. Everything about ducks is harder from a hygiene standpoint. Like so many things when the fairly ignorant broad brush media reports on something, these nuances can entirely change the story.
What if 90 percent of the cases are ducks? I doubt that anyone is keeping tabs on how many additional backyard poultry flocks there are since March, but my guess is certainly tens of thousands. Every farmer I know who sells poultry into the backyard market sold four and five times the normal numbers over the last few months. That's a massive increase.
Realize that many of those flocksters are first timers. Inexperience is costly. How many people purchased animals and were not prepared in skill or infrastructure to care for them? But again, the media does not tease out experienced versus inexperienced caretakers. It blames the poultry when I would argue that the blame is inexperienced flocksters who no doubt are learning and will do better in the future. Who does anything well on the first try?
Finally, people who spray sterilizers like perfume open themselves up to a more aggressive response to natural pathogens when they eventually expose themselves. This is the famous hygiene hypothesis, which views the immune system like a muscle. Without routine exercise, the immune system becomes lethargic and then over-reacts when a real assault comes along.
This is a growing issue in a video-game urbanized sanitized population. Farmers like us who take young people eager to learn this ancient vocation find ourselves routinely bumping up against lethargic immune systems. This is also a growing problem in the raw milk community. Or apple cider. Or living cheese. When food lives, it has a vibrant bacterial community in it, on it, around it.
If you've grown up on Game of Thrones and Cheerios, authentic food and something as benign as a chicken feather can overrun the immune system. To be sure, the filthiest chickens I've ever seen have been in backyards and organic farms. It doesn't surprise me that a multiplicative increase in backyard flocks would create an uptick in salmonella cases.
But let's not blame the chickens or ducks. Let's appreciate that we have thousands of novices trying it out; we have immuno-suppressed children suddenly petting chickens; ducks are way harder to keep clean than chickens. All these nuances, I fear, are being lost in the media narrative.
Do you have a flock of chickens?