Julia Tomkins Wisner
“Thanks to factory farming, bird flu is a ticking time bomb.”
Senior Corporate Engagement Director Michael Windsor’s op-ed was recently published in Salon.
His piece covers the current avian flu crisis, and how the factory farming industry is to blame for its insistence on keeping farmed animals in intensive confinement. In 2025, the vast majority of birds (74%, or over 22 million) killed to control the outbreak were chickens in battery cages.
“Continuing to raise animals in overcrowded conditions and relying on mass depopulation is an unsustainable and inhumane response. Industrialized animal agriculture has created this crisis, and we are all dealing with the consequences,” wrote Windsor. Some of these consequences included an increased risk of future pandemics, a new strain of avian flu detected in a flock of chickens raised for meat (with a nearly 40% mortality rate in humans), and a rapid spread that now affects cows, house cats, wild birds, and more.
He explained that the mass killing of flocks is done through ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+), a controversial industry practice of killing animals via lethal heat stress. Meanwhile, many other countries have developed more effective, more humane mitigation efforts to curtail outbreaks such as vaccination programs, and moving away from intensive confinement.
But any attempts at a similar program in the US have been stymied by industry interests, even though Windsor pointed out that proper program implementation would be a boon for egg consumers and animals alike: “Implementing a vaccine program now could help slow the spread, minimize animal suffering, and stabilize consumer prices… A successful program would combine vaccination with biosecurity measures such as PPE, restricted access, sanitation, ongoing surveillance, and early detection.”
The piece ends with Windsor calling on companies like Subway to respond to consumer demand by honoring their cage-free promises, and for everyone “to push for a food system that prioritizes safety and sustainability over profit-driven confinement and cruelty.”
To learn more about how the chicken meat industry is preventing the implementation of effective vaccination programs by prioritizing profits over disease prevention, and how taxpayer funding has propped up the industry, read the piece in full at Salon.
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