Bird flu: chickens are coming home to roost – DutchNews.nl.
Almost every farmer or farmers’ representative is singing from the same hymn sheet these days: it’s those dangerous migrating birds that are visiting the disease on a helpless industry. Chickens shouldn’t roam free, they say, although outbreaks occurred at six chicken farms in north west Europe where the animals were kept indoors. Scientists from the Royal Dutch Academy of Science (KNAW) are exasperated at the industry’s making scapegoats of migrating birds as there is no evidence whatsoever to support their claim. Time bomb And even if the evidence were there it would not exonerate the industry. Contamination and culls are a choice, not an inevitability. The sector and the government are consistently going for the wrong option. The sector is sitting on a time bomb. There are some hundred million chickens in the Netherlands. No other country has so many chickens caged up on such a small surface. They are also concentrated in two neighbouring regions: the Peel and the Gelderse Vallei. In the words of an epidemiologist from Wageningen university: ‘The proximity between the farms and the number of chickens means an outbreak in one single farm would be the end of the whole valley. That is the problem.’ What we should do then is scale down the livestock industry.
Read more at DutchNews.nl: Bird flu: chickens are coming home to roost http://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2014/12/bird-flu-chickens-are-coming-home-to-roost.php/



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