People focus on that last second of death. I want them to focus on the entire life of the animal. If I had to choose between knowing that my throat was going to be slit at the end, which might last three minutes, but I’ve had to live for six weeks in pain, I’d probably ask for that slit throat six weeks earlier. People only see the killing. They say, “What’s the big deal if the animal can’t walk or move, ’cause it’s just gonna get killed anyway?” If it was your child, do you want your child to suffer three years, three months, three weeks, three hours, three minutes? A turkey chick isn’t a human baby, but it suffers. I’ve never met anyone in the industry — manager, vet, worker, anyone — who doubts that they feel pain. So how much suffering is acceptable? That’s what’s at the bottom of all of this, and what each person has to ask himself. How much suffering will you tolerate for your food?
My nephew and his wife had a baby, and as soon as it was born they were told it wasn’t going to survive. They’re very religious. They got to hold her for twenty minutes. For twenty minutes she was alive, and in no pain, and she was part of their life. And they said they would never have traded those twenty minutes. They just thanked the Lord and praised him that she was alive, even if it was only twenty minutes. So how you gonna approach that?
On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime—one animal for every letter on the last five pages.
Lam Hoi-ka
BREVIG MISSION IS A TINY Inuit village on the Bering Strait. The one full-time local government employee is a “financial administrator.” No police or fire department, no utilities workmen, no waste management. Amazingly, though, there is an online dating service. (One might have thought that with only 276 citizens, everyone would more or less know who was available.) There are two women and two men looking for love, which would be good math, except that one of the men — last time I checked the site, anyway — isn’t into women. Cutieguy1, a black African, self-described as “cute 5.4 feet tall looking,” is the second-least-likely person you might imagine finding in Brevig. The prize itself goes to Johan Hultin, a six-foot-tall Swede with a shock of white hair and a trim white goatee. Hultin arrived in Brevig on August 19, 1997, having told only one person about his trip, and got right to digging. Beneath the feet of solid ice were bodies. He was excavating a mass grave.
Deep in the permafrost were preserved victims of the 1918 flu pandemic. The one person Hultin shared his plans with was a fellow scientist, Jeffery Taubenberger, who was also looking for the source of the 1918 flu.
Hultin’s search for the dead of 1918 was timely. It was only a few months before his arrival in Brevig Mission that an H5N1-type virus in Hong Kong’s chickens apparently “jumped” to humans for the first time — an event of potentially historic significance.
Three-year-old Lam Hoi-ka was the first of six to be killed by this particularly ominous version of the H5N1 virus. I, and now you, know his name because when a deadly virus jumps species, a window opens through which a new pandemic may enter the world. Had health authorities not acted as they did (or had our luck been worse), Lam Hoi-ka might have been death number one in a global pandemic. He still might be. The worrisome strains of H5N1 have not disappeared from the planet even if it has disappeared from American headlines. The question is whether it will continue to kill a relatively small number of people or mutate into a deadlier version. Viruses like H5N1 can be ferocious entrepreneurs, constantly innovating, relentless in their aim of corrupting the human immune system.
With a potential H5N1 nightmare looming, Hultin and Taubenberger wanted to know what had caused the 1918 pandemic. And for good reason: the 1918 pandemic killed more people faster than any other disease — or any other anything — had before or has since.
Influenza
THE 1918 PANDEMIC HAS BEEN remembered as the “Spanish flu” because the Spanish press was the only Western media to adequately cover its massive toll. (Some speculate that this is because the Spanish were not at war, and their press was not as distorted by wartime censorship and distraction.) Despite the name, Spanish flu struck the entire world — that’s what made it a pandemic instead of simply an epidemic. It was not the first influenza pandemic, nor the most recent (1957 and 1968 also saw pandemics), but it was by far the most deadly. Whereas AIDS took roughly twenty-four years to kill 24 million people, the Spanish flu killed as many in twenty- four weeks. Some recent revisions of the death toll suggest that 50 million or even as many as 100 million people were killed worldwide. Estimates suggest that one-quarter of Americans, and perhaps one-quarter of the world, fell ill.
Unlike most influenzas that mortally threaten only the very young, very old, and already ill, the Spanish flu killed healthy people in the prime of their lives. Mortality was actually highest in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine-year-old group, and at the flu’s peak the average life expectancy for Americans was reduced to thirty-seven years. The scale of the misery was so vast in America — as elsewhere — that I find it impossible to understand why I didn’t learn more about it in school, or through memorials or stories. As many as twenty thousand Americans died in a week during the height of the Spanish flu. Steam shovels were used to dig mass graves.
Health authorities today fear precisely such an event. Many insist that a pandemic based on the H5N1 virus strain is inevitable, and the question is really one of when it will strike and, most important, just how severe it will be.
Even if the H5N1 virus manages to pass us by without much more ultimate impact than the recent outbreak of swine flu, no health authority today is predicting that pandemics can be completely prevented. The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said simply, “We know another pandemic is inevitable. . . . It is coming.” The National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine has added more recently that a pandemic is “not only inevitable, but overdue.” Recent history has averaged a pandemic every twenty-seven and a half years, and it’s now been over forty years since the last one. Scientists cannot know with certainty the future of pandemic diseases, but they can and do know that a threat is imminent.
WHO officials now have at their fingertips the most massive assemblage of scientific data ever gathered about a potential new flu pandemic. So it is quite unnerving that this very suit-and-tie-and-long-white-jackets, very now-don’t-everyone-panic type of institution has the following list of “things you need to know about pandemic influenza” for its constituency, which is everyone:
The world may be on the brink of another pandemic.
All countries will be affected.
Widespread illness will occur.
Medical supplies will be inadequate.
Large numbers of deaths will occur.
Economic and social disruption will be great.
The relatively conservative WHO suggests “a relatively conservative estimate — from 2 million to 7.4 million deaths” if bird flu jumps to humans and becomes airborne (as swine flu — H1N1 — did). “This estimate,” they go on to explain, “is based on the comparatively mild 1957 pandemic. Estimates based on a more virulent virus, closer to the one seen in 1918, have been made and are much higher.” Mercifully, the WHO does not include these higher estimates on its “things you need to know” list. Unmercifully, they cannot say that higher estimates are any less realistic.
Hultin eventually uncovered the remains of a woman among the frozen dead of 1918 and named her Lucy. He cut out Lucy’s lungs and mailed them to Taubenberger, who took samples from the tissue and found evidence of something quite remarkable. The results, published in 2005, show that the source of the 1918 pandemic was avian influenza — bird flu. A major scientific question had been answered.
Other evidence suggests that the 1918 virus might have mutated within pigs (which are uniquely susceptible to both human and bird viruses) or even in human populations for a time before reaching the deadly virtuosity of its final version. We cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that there is scientific consensus that new viru
ses, which move between farmed animals and humans, will be a major global health threat into the foreseeable future. The concern is not only bird flu or swine flu or whatever-comes-next, but the entire class of “zoonotic” (animal-to-human or vice versa) pathogens — especially viruses that move between humans, chickens, turkeys, and pigs.
We can also be sure that any talk of pandemic influenza today cannot ignore the fact that the most devastating disease event the world has ever known, and one of the greatest health threats before us today, has everything to do with the health of the world’s farmed animals, birds most of all.
All Flus
ANOTHER KEY FIGURE IN THE story of influenza research is a virologist named Robert Webster, who proved the avian origins of all human influenza. He called it the “barnyard theory,” which surmises that “the viruses in human pandemics recruit some of their genes from flu viruses in domestic birds.”
A few years after the 1968 “Hong Kong flu” pandemic (whose successor strains continue to quietly cause twenty thousand “excess deaths” annually in the United States), Webster identified the responsible virus. As he anticipated, the virus was a hybrid that had incorporated aspects of a bird virus found in a duck in central Europe. Today the best evidence suggests that the avian source of the 1968 pandemic is not unique: scientists now argue that the primordial source of all flu strains is migrating aquatic birds such as ducks and geese that have roamed the earth for more than a hundred million years. The flu, it turns out, is all about our relationship with birds.
Some basic science is necessary here. As the original source of these viruses, wild ducks, geese, terns, and gulls harbor the full spectrum of flu strains as categorized by today’s science: H1 through the recently discovered H16, N1 through N9. Domestic birds can also harbor a large reservoir of such flu strains. Neither wild nor domestic birds necessarily become sick from these viruses. They often simply carry them, sometimes clear across the globe, and then shed them through feces into lakes, rivers, ponds, and, quite often, thanks to industrial animal-processing techniques, directly into the food we eat.
Each mammalian species is vulnerable to only some of the viruses carried by birds. Humans, for example, are typically vulnerable to only H1, H2, and H3 viruses, pigs to H1 and H3, and horses to H3 and H7. The H stands for hemagglutinin, a spike-shaped protein found on the surface of influenza viruses and named after its ability to “agglutinate” — that is, to clump together red blood cells. Hemagglutinin serves as a kind of molecular bridge that allows the virus itself to flow into the victim’s cells like enemy troops crossing a makeshift bridge. Hemagglutinin is able to accomplish this deadly work through its remarkable ability to bind itself to specific kinds of molecular structures, known as receptors, on the surface of human and animal cells. H1, H2, and H3 — the three types of hemagglutinin that commonly attack humans — are specialists in binding to our respiratory systems, which is why the flu so often begins in the human respiratory tract.
The trouble begins when a virus in one species begins to get itchy and starts showing a fondness for mixing with viruses in others, as H1N1 has done (combining bird, pig, and human viruses). In the case of H5N1, there are fears that the actual “creation” of a new virus highly contagious to humans might occur in pig populations, since pigs are susceptible to the types of viruses that attack birds as well as to those that attack humans. When a single pig gets infected with two different virus types at the same time, there is a possibility of viruses trading genes. The H1N1 swine flu appears to have resulted from just this. What’s worrisome is that such gene swapping could lead to the creation of a virus that has the virulence of bird flu and the everyone-is-getting-it contagiousness of the common cold.
How did this new landscape of disease come about? To what extent is modern animal agriculture responsible? To answer these questions, we need to know where the birds we eat come from, and why their environments are perfect to make not only the birds, but us, sick.
The Life and Death of a Bird
THE SECOND FARM I SAW with C was set up in a series of twenty sheds, each 45 feet wide by 490 feet long, each holding in the neighborhood of 33,000 birds. I didn’t have a tape measure with me and couldn’t do anything resembling a head count. But I can assert these numbers with confidence because the dimensions are typical in the industry — though some growers are now building larger sheds: up to 60 feet by 504 feet, housing 50,000 or more birds.
It’s hard to get one’s head around the magnitude of 33,000 birds in one room. You don’t have to see it for yourself, or even do the math, to understand that things are packed pretty tight. In its Animal Welfare Guidelines, the National Chicken Council indicates an appropriate stocking density to be eight-tenths of a square foot per bird. That’s what’s considered animal welfare by a “mainstream” organization representing chicken producers, which shows you how thoroughly co-opted ideas about welfare have become — and why you can’t trust labels that come from anywhere but a reliable third-party source.
It’s worth pausing on this for a moment. Although many animals live with far less, let’s assume the full eight-tenths of a square foot. Try to picture it. (It’s unlikely you’ll ever get to see the inside of a poultry factory farm in person, but there are plenty of images on the Internet if your imagination needs help.) Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.
Now to the farming.
First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1 and 4 percent of the birds will die writhing in convulsions from sudden death syndrome, a condition virtually unknown outside of factory farms. Another factory-farm-induced condition in which excess fluids fill the body cavity, ascites, kills even more (5 percent of birds globally). Three out of four will have some degree of walking impairment, and common sense suggests they are in chronic pain. One out of four will have such significant trouble walking that there is no question they are in pain.
For your broilers, leave the lights on about twenty-four hours a day for the first week or so of the chicks’ lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe four hours of darkness a day — just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long — the lighting and crowding, the burdens of their grotesque bodies. At least broiler birds are typically slaughtered on the forty-second day of their lives (or increasingly the thirty-ninth), so they haven’t yet established social hierarchies to fight over.
Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.
Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don’t taste quite right — how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated an
imal possibly taste? — but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with “broths” and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, “ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.”)
The farming done, it’s now time for “processing.”
First, you’ll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and “hold the line” that will turn the living, whole birds into plastic-wrapped parts. You will have to continuously find the workers, since annual turnover rates typically exceed 100 percent. (The interviews I did suggest turnover rates of around 150 percent.) Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable employees. By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America’s slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations; for you, they constitute a crucial way to produce cheap meat and feed the world. Pay your workers minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds — grabbing five in each hand, upside down by the legs — and jam them into transport crates.