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peekdasneaks t1_j3ysk20 wrote

Reply to comment by poorbill in Why do poultry producers kill their stock when they get bird flu, rather than keeping survivors to reproduce? by poorbill

Its less about the genetics and far more about the conditions. If humans were literally stuffed into cages with other humans and not allowed room to move, then all those cages were packed together into warehouses, we would have similar health issues.

Just check out what happened on the slave ships for example. Its terrible what we put other living beings through.

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JennaSais t1_j3z3b83 wrote

I agree that those things suck, but this virus also affects small and free-range producers, as well as wild birds (though not always with as high a mortality rate), so it's not the conditions that lead to the 90-100% mortality rate.

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Planetary_Epitaph t1_j3zayuu wrote

I think you might be half missing the point - the conditions are practically the best case scenario for engendering the creation of extraordinarily virulent diseases, and with such a huge population to infect nearby, high lethality doesn’t have the reproductive evolutionary disadvantages it normally does where the host needs to survive long enough to transmit.

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JennaSais t1_j3zcef4 wrote

No, I get that, but I'm saying that unfortunately for this one that horse has already left the barn, so to speak, so if the system changed tomorrow it would be just as bad as far as this virus is concerned. The same mortality rate would apply to those newly-freed chickens. And since it infects other species of fowl (ducks, for example) with less lethality it actually has all the advantages of a lower mortality rate while still being able to infect and be more lethal to chickens, whatever their living situation.

I absolutely believe we need to stop keeping animals of all kinds in conditions like that, to be clear, for this and many other reasons. That's why I got chickens of my own.

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