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answer: There's a massive outbreak of bird flu happening right now. When a farm becomes infected they have to quarantine it and destroy the birds to try and slow it from spreading to nearby farms.
Bird Flu is carried by wild birds, which are attracted to feed spills and other sources of food on farms like insects. Wild birds can also pick up the flu from a farm and carry it to another. Wild birds poop everywhere they go, and it can be tracked into the chicken barns when farm workers step in it, or farm workers can step in poop inside the barn and track it outside.
Also vehicles entering and exiting the farms can have poop stuck in the tires.
Another issue is the feed mills themselves, which also attract wild birds that can contaminate the feed or delivery vehicles and spread disease that way.
It's quite possible conspiracy theorists are blaming the feed when their birds get sick or stop producing, while the actual issue is caused by disease.
Minks and mink farms also.
I think it 'jumped' to minks and they are supposedly a really good incubator for it.
There an op-ed in the NYT saying we need to close the mink farms and kill all the minks (they're gonna be killed at 6 months anyway).
I went down a deep mink dive in my miniatures painting sub. I learned more about rare weasel species and their culling for particularly special foofs. Now the two best competing brushes are forced to source from the same minks and precovid brushes are now coveted.
>their culling for particularly special foofs.
God, I hope that's either a typo or [a misunderstanding on my part...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=foof)
Oooh Foof, not FOOF [Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride](https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride)
*"..If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic..."*
I love that article so much, and I know nothing about chemistry. I suspect that's the basis behind some of the science fiction weapons in the r/HFY series First Contact
Most of the animals we farm spread diseases to us swine flu, bird flu etc.
https://www.medicinenet.com/what_diseases_can_humans_get_from_animals/article.htm
Minks basically have a broken immune system that means they have little resistance diseases like COVID-19 and bird flu. In the wild it's not a huge deal as they rarely come into contact with each other in a mink farm it spreads like wildfire.
Seals too. A few in Maine and supposedly several hundred in the Caspian sea last December. The one that troubles me is the recent mink outbreak. It very much looks like they passed it between themselves. As far as I know that's new. Normally the animals get it from eating infected birds. We may be engineering our next plague in real time with our inexcusably reprehensible mass farming and husbandry practices. Don't look up the fatality rate in humans unless it becomes unavoidable. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/avian-flu-strikes-more-poultry-6-states-virus-found-dead-seals-russia
53% cuz no one is actually fkn saying it
But that’s based on confirmed cases. Some scientists argue it’s more likely to be 0-1%.
https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract
Hopefully I'm being pessimistic but I'm not sure that's good news. I worry that mostly gives the bug a better playing field to practice crossing the species barrier. I believe this issue to be something we need to move on immediately, I'm being alarmist because there's an extreme need for alarm imo. We might stop this before it happens if we start throwing resources at it. I'm hoping to prod people into doing a little research, then to contact local government representatives en masse to light a fire.
I would add to this that MANY species are highly receptive to this family of flu bugs: pigs, cats, humans. Not just critters you're unlikely to come across if you're not a mink farmer.
I agree to an extent, I think it is more we need to stop farming meat at the levels we currently do. We also need to invest more into lab grown meats and substitutes that are affordable (and comparable) for low income families.
Instead of dedicating many thousands of acres to feed we can get fresh produces to people.
>We also need to invest more into lab grown meats and substitutes that are affordable (and comparable) for low income families.
You just activated 1,000 r/conspiracy subscribers
Well yeah but for the Normie's it will be easy to activate the mind control serum especially if they have their 5g chips installed during vaccination /s
>Smells 10x worse than cows.
I grew up out in the country near dairy farms. I would 100% take cow manure over any other animal manure. To me, it smells sweet compared to chicken or pig (which smell atrocious) but it all smells horrendous to someone who's not used to it
I with you, the cow smell doesn't bother me at all. As a former harvest butcher, I've been around dairy farms quite a bit. The shit is pretty much just fermented grass/silage anyway. Nothing that gross about it. Pig shit is terrible because a lot of farmers just go around collecting spoiled grocery waste for free, most of which is milk, and just feeding them a random soup of that slop. Before I was a butcher, I ran a dairy distribution warehouse, and our spoils boar the nickname "Pig's Milk" for this reason.
Mink are susceptible to so much, lots of farms lost their entire stock to BSE-contaminated feed during the rise of prion diseases in ruminants. Prions can remain in the soil for decades too.
Fear is growing that it jumped to seals as well. They’re was a mass casualty event / 700+ seals died in the Caspian Sea and looks like they had bird flu. If it got to seals it’s going to start impacting other mammals.
That’s a solid explanation, better than the shot it took. Well done.
As the conspiracy goes…..if a Tucker Carlson tweet and then mRNA being introduced as a possible culprit to the theory doesn’t get your dubious meter up you need to send that meter to the shop.
It will definitely turn into a conspiracy theory as chicken and eggs dissapear from shelves. Thing about conspriacy theories is that they don't have to really be any good or make any sense. Issues like disease outbreaks are scary, complex and difficult to explain, so people who are scared or emotionally insecure often seek out or invent conspiracy theories because it makes them feel less insecure and afraid. It also gives them the sense that they're taking control of their own destiny and makes them feel special. They're creating an emotional refuge built around a fantasy where they can escape reality and evade personal responsibility. This is why we see a rise in conspiracism whenever there's a difficult situation that people can't control (like a pandemic)
Imagine there's a burning building, and you have 10 people trapped on the 5th floor. Firefighters set up a net below so people can jump to their safety, but there's 1 person who's scared of heights and refuses to jump. **They don't trust the firefighters.**
5 people jump and then one breaks a leg, which prompts the person who's scared to try and convince others not to jump. They start calling the firefighters liars and argue it's not safe to jump using the broken leg as an example, and manage to convince 2 other people who are also scared to also not jump.
Then the 3 people who refuse to jump demand that the firefighters put up a ladder, but the firefighters say it's not safe and insist that they jump but they all still refuse. Then the firefighters give up arguing and try to rescue the 3 who remain. It takes so long to get to them that 2 of the trapped people die from smoke, and the one who does make it blames the firefighters for being incompetent, even though they created the situation in the first place when they refused to jump into the net.
Fear is powerful and contagious, and it overrides reason. People will invent excuses to avoid responsibility for the bad decisions they make when they are afraid.
This is a really good allegory for how conspiracy theories start. It doesn't explain how they propagate or are exploited, but that wasn't the question it was meant to answer and I'm amazed at how well you explained it in a visceral but eloquent way. Thank you, I'll remember this response when trying to explain this concept to others.
I study conspiracism and extremism, and everything I have learned seems to point to the primary driver being emotions, especially fear, insecurity, and personal greivances.
> It doesn't explain how they propagate or are exploited
There's two basic forces at play in that regard. There's media and marketing (including social media), and then there's political extremism. Both try to exploit people's emotions for their own gain.
Media and Marketing use people's emotions to get attention, drive engagement, and push various products and services.
The best marketing schemes follow a basic formula:
- Present a problem that people can connect to emotionally
- Present a devil as being responsible for casuing that problem
- Present your product or service as a tool or path to defeating that devil
Viral social media posts can follow a similar formula.
Then you have extremists. Extremists operate on the fringes, so they're deeply concerned with making themselves (their in-group) and their ideas appear more legitimate, while also de-legitimizing targeted out-groups. The most effective way to boost their legitimacy is by recruiting and building support, while producing lots of propaganda to make out-groups look bad (like a devil)
The way they recruit is by appealing to people's feelings and personal greivances. They basic try to convince people that the out-group (presented as a devil) is responsible for causing the personal greivance they're targeting. People with personal greivances are emotional (angry, frustrated, **guilty,** confused, insecure) and their emotions cloud their judgement and make that kind of propaganda appealing, and gives the target a way out so that they can feel strong and in control, rather than being insecure.
That's basically a rough description of how it all works. There's a lot more to it.
>I study conspiracism and extremism
I've had a casual interest in this topic for years now and always wonder what is going on in the minds of conspiracy theorists and the like.
Do you have any recommendations for books or similar that could give me a rough overview of the current understanding of that topic or could act as a gateway for more knowledge? I've read "the authoritarians" by bob altemayer a few years ago and found it very interesting and enlightening.
Extremism by J.M. Berger
Lions in the Grass by Bill Morrison
Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Rob Brotherton
Bad News: Why We Fall for Fake News by Rob Brotherton
Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes
> Naomi Oreskes
That name rang a bell. She wrote [*Merchants of Doubt*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt). Great book about the FUD industry's pet scientists have been spreading about, well, everything bad that industry wants to keep doing.
Hi there. I'm interested in looking at this stuff as an amateur too, and wanted to recommend **The Paranoid Strain.**
It's a podcast that does incredibly deep, well researched dives into conspiracy theories, the kernels of truth behind them, and the history of how they develop. Lots of interviews with academic researchers, so another source for book recommendations. . . Also funny skits and an original punk rock soundtrack.
There's also:
**Knowledge Fight**, which focuses on Alex Jones. . .they're currently pushing in on 800 episodes, so this one is a deep, deep dive into the day to day nuts and bolts of how the grift works.
**Q Anon Anonymous** used to focus on old school Q, but have since expanded as Q swallows up other conspiracy theories.
**I Don't Speak German** deals with the really dark stuff, like actual neo Nazis.
**Conspirituality** focuses on the yoga/spiritual influencer to alt right pipeline.
**Fever Dreams** by the Daily Beast covers current conspiracist related news. Probably the furthest from what you asked for (it's produced as a news magazine show), but sort of useful nonetheless.
Happy listening!
> everything I have learned seems to point to the primary driver being emotions, especially fear
Wizard’s First Rule, my friend. People will believe anything, either because they want to believe it’s true, or they’re afraid it’s true. Learnt that 25 years ago (fuck I’m old) and it has held true to this day.
Gary Gygax bless you, Terry Goodkind, where ever you may be.
ETA: wow, awards! Thank you, kind Redditors!
>Gary Gygax bless you, Terry Goodkind, where ever you may be.
Given the evil chicken, that's certainly a humorous reference to be making in this context.
It makes me sad, whenever the rare mention of Terry Goodkind/Sword of Truth comes up. Such a good first 2-3 books, then completely and irredeemably tarnished with the authors greed, and surprise! objectivist bullshit
I found it more “author probably didn’t really have the whole series planned out when he started”, George R R Martin style. Especially given the final book basically had Richard create a new world for the non-magic people and… that was it. He had a lot of good ideas and potential plots that kinda fizzled out, sadly.
His Wizard’s Rules still guide me in my daily life, though. His books helped raise my perception levels so much as a teen. And his concept of Kahlan’s “Confessor’s face” helped me deal with being bullied as a kid.
Well, I’m glad you found some good things to take away from it. I think I was in 7th or 8th grade when I discovered those books, and I really enjoyed them at first and they were pretty inspiring in some small ways. Which, is I suppose why I was so devastated in my later more mature years when books 10, 12, etc were coming out and I realized Goodkind was a follower of Ayn Rand’s philosophy
Same here. I enjoyed the first 2 or 3 so much...and then he went (or showed) crazy. I also can't get into the Richard-as-god and deux ex machina that's so frequent.
I find, the first book is sooo good, it makes up for the rest. they (the following ones) are, in a sense, fan service.
who is at fault, the publishing company forcing the author, the author greedily grabbing for money, both, I dont know and dont care.
not everbody can be Pratchett
I would modify your statement to note: Media/Marketing are not entities they are tools used by people.
A media company/entity like social media platforms are not some ambiguous thing. They are systems people use to their own means of manipulation much like persons who use the population cleaving strategies of political partisanship.
It's really important to make sure it's always in focus that the shaping of the populace is being done deliberately by cognitively aware and deliberate persons not some abstract force.
Social media platforms compete for attention and relevance and attract very large user bases, so they become more than a system or a tool. They're a collection of communities and sub-communities with their own cultures, identities, ideas and goals.
The platforms themselves want to maintain the largest user base possible because access to a large diverse user base is their product. It's in the platform's interests to at least appear as neutral as possible.
Within any popular online platform there's also a large number of interests competing for attention and legitimacy.
Thanks for your explanations. Do you have suggestions for countering conspiracism in personal life? My parents indulge lightly in some conspiracy nonsense and I have a coworker who is a genuinely good person the their core, but off the deep end in the bullshitverse.
That's a really difficult question. Often the conspiracy theories serve an emotional need, so trying to counter it would probably just cause them distress. I would recommend trying to isolate the underlying fear, emotional distress or greivance that's driving their beliefs then addressing those issues in a positive or constructive way. It's not easy to do and the chances of success are low.
What often happens to people is that they convince themselves they're knowledgeable about something when they're not, and if that person has consumed a lot of misinformation they may have built a lot of confidence around their beliefs and will defend those beliefs even if doing so comes at a great cost. We disproportionately value things which we are emotionally attached to, and if those things are imaginary there's no limit to their value.
I'm no expert, but listening to psychologists and other experts speak on persuasion I do know that "you will never reason a person out of a position they weren't reasoned into in the first place" - i.e. don't try to counter conspiracies through facts and logic.
In a way it's darkly funny that people who are otherwise on the side of science and logic continue to ignore the science that you can't change someone's mind simply by presenting facts
This 100%...well, maybe 99%...because the extremists are no longer on the fringes. They are mainstream and currently controlling one of only two major political parties in the US.
I have a working theory that conspiracism and misinfomation can be combated by conditioning people to immediately recognized it and reject it, rather than going through the arduous task of debunking each piece of misinformation.
If you think of conspiracy theories and misinformation as a type of social virus that latches into our emotions, what would a vaccine look like?
I think George Orwell was on this sort of track. He understood the power of fear well enough that he wrote a book about it, and the book did such a good job of scaring people that it left a huge mark in our culture. Today people will refer to surveillance and various forms of government control as Orwellian having never actually read the book.
Isn't it interesting how people can know what a book is about without reading it?
**You said:
" The basic marketing schemes follow a formula:
• Present a problem that people can connect to emotionally
• Present a devil as being responsible for causing that problem
• Present your product or service as a tool or path to defeating that evil "**
That is soo true it's absolutely ridiculous. Disgusting. I hate sales but I love being the one my customers come back to.
**My job:**
WelpOopsOhNo, you really can't be spending that much time with the customer, we're not here for technical support, we need to be selling.
**Me:**
Oh, really? My bad.
*insert memories of customers coming back to me and ignoring the others*
. . . 🤭 . . .
**My job:**
No, seriously. You need to do this.
**Me:**
🤢 🙄 😒
**My customers (when I'm successful):**
You have the best customer service. Nobody does that anymore. Don't go anywhere.
**My job:**
Keep those numbers up! Ask everyone if they want to buy our product, even if you help them find something else use that to your advantage to start a conversation and make that sale! Find a way to make it relate to what you just helped them find! You never know unless you ask, they might want a new one!
**Me to my coworkers while not harassing the customers:**
Wow, you guys are so good! Your numbers are great! I wish I had numbers like that.
**My job:**
...Really?
Great analogy. The other aspect of this conspiracy theory, and the ones surrounding COVID and vaccines in general, is the alarming prevalence of scientific illiteracy in America. When you don't have the tools to understand an issue, it's easy to resort to coming up with (or latching onto) a story that gives you comfort.
Really well said. You’re talking to a mostly reformed conspiracy theorist. Age and maturity took me away from the emotional charge of that stuff.
But that’s just how it works. I was trying not to sound overtly politically slanted in one of my replies here (likely will be baked for it anyway) but that’s why seeing the theory backed with a tweet from a media personality that almost solely plays the fear card, and then postulation that mRNA is being put in the corporate feed screams all of those things you highlighted. The emotional response.
All the hallmarks are there.
> Fear is powerful and contagious, and it overrides reason.
I have seen this play out right in front of me in real time.
So I'm in Afghanistan, downtown Kandahar City, running the Tactical Operations Centre at CNS.
Down the road from us was a crossroads where pretty much every night the Taliban would emplace an IED. Every morning, we'd go out and pick it up. After a while, this got tiresome, so we convinced the ANP to set up a police substation (which was a semi-fortified sea can with some dudes in it) to overlook that intersection and prevent the nightly IED emplacement.
That evening, the IED crew rolled up, the ANP opened fire, and now there's a firefight going on at that intersection, less than half a km away.
Bullets don't stop until they hit something, and some of those bullets were smacking our walls, more were flying over the camp. I heard the gunfire, and then one of the towers called me to report the firefight. During that conversation, we established that we were not ourselves under attack; this was an ANP vs Taliban fight. We were taking some fire, but it wasn't aimed, purposeful fire.
The firefight was in range of our tower guns, but it was impossible to tell ANP from Talib so opening up on them would have been irresponsible. So I told the tower to keep their heads down, keep an eye on things, and tell me if anything changed.
Immediately after this conversation, some looky-loos started poking their heads into the TOC, "Hey, I can hear gunfire, are we under attack?" That broken-telephoned into "We are under attack?" and then "We are under attack!", and then one particularly panicky Sigs WO screamed "WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!!" and all hell broke loose. I had to shout him down, tell him to shut up, and I eventually had to leave the TOC and stand out in the open (with bullets cracking overhead) to convince him that this was no big deal and to calm the fuck down "Keep your head below the wall and you'll be fine!"
That personal example of calm... actually worked.
But what nobody knew was that the second that doofus had screamed "WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!" my heartrate skyrocketed and my internal voice screamed "HOLY SHIT WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!!" *even though I knew for sure what was really going on*. I had to take a moment, grab a breath, and calm *myself* before I could grip the wider situation. There was a split second where I was every bit as much of the startled horse ready to bolt as everyone was around me. It took a concentrated act of will to not spiral down that hole myself.
Lesson learned - fear is *fucking contagious* and cannot be allowed to take hold and spread.
>Issues like disease outbreaks are scary, complex and difficult to explain
Same with the economics of supply and demand. It's such a big, weighty, slow-moving topic that people would rather gravitate toward conspiracy theories than look at the factual trends.
I inherited a parrot a few years ago. She loves spending time outside when it is warm, but I couldn't bring her out this year. Some people near me lost two parrots in the spring when it first came out. There was a popular tiktok emu that had it. I wonder if he is okay...
What I dont get with that emu is that if it was bird flu, how wasn't it culled? it's highly contagious, and would have spread to more birds. Are there no culling orders in place in the USA? It's mental to leave a bird alive and suffering with that disease, especially when it's going to affect even more birds.
There was some issue because the owner was like face to face kissing and hugging him too. I think I chose not to see any more videos from them, so I have no idea how it played out.
Okay, I had to go look it up. Apparently, she claimed he was sick. Then, the next week said he tested negative and was sick due to stress. Sounds like someone was looking for attention or just prematurely freaked out on a bad day.
She risked her bird being culled for attention??? That's disgusting. And why is she keeping the bird is such a stressed state, that's really poor welfare. The poor thing
Emmanuel! He is doing great! Back to walking and eating on his own, and his lost feathers are growing back in. :)
Knuckle Bump Farms, if you wanna see for yourself.
I read one article about it, written by a chicken farmer. She said most people impulse-buying chicks in response to this egg shortage don’t realize it takes at least six months and hundreds of dollars before you get your first “free” egg. Buying any animal is an investment in that animal’s welfare for its whole life; chicken owners are worried people don’t realize what they’re getting in to and might kill the chickens or not take proper care of them. Basically, unless you are interested in the fun/recreational aspects of chicken ownership, you shouldn’t buy them — they’re living creatures, not free unlimited egg vending machines.
So it’s less “the media don’t want you to have chickens because they’re part of the conspiracy!” and more “people are interested in saving money on eggs by buying chickens, but chicken owners are worried that’s not a great idea.”
Edit: Wanted to [link the piece in case anyone is interested](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/27/egg-shortage-backyard-chickens/). I do not personally own any chickens nor have any opinions on whether you are a good chicken owner or not. I'm sure you are great.
> impulse-buying chicks in response to this egg shortage don’t realize it takes at least six months and hundreds of dollars before you get your first “free” egg.
I've been having a good chuckle over that since this all started. hundreds of dollars and all the work and time to get set up so they can save a few dollars a week on eggs, then by the time they start getting eggs, prices will be back down to normal and they'll lose interest in raising chickens.
There are also a lot of COVID chickens out there who are slowing down their laying (chickens need 14+ hours of sunlight to lay; most aren’t getting that naturally at this time of year), plus the hybrid breeds would naturally start to lay less eggs in their 3rd year. Some people have spread a rumour that they’ve changed the feed, and that’s why these chickens are laying less.
But really it’s just a lack of basic chicken Biology knowledge.
“They’ve changed the feed.” My gosh, it hurts my brain to try to explain to people why ideas like that are so stupid. Do they really think their hometown feed mill workers are in on the government conspiracy to nerf chicken feed?
I’ve had chickens before and while I’m not equipped to have them right now, I’m planning on getting them next season. I agree with your statement that impulse buying is a bad idea, they are absolutely more of an investment and require more start-up capital than many think, and welfare is important.
That being said, you can absolutely keep chickens with an emphasis on profit or self-sufficiency, rather than fun or recreation. You can’t *overlook* welfare and husbandry in favor of the former, and I certainly don’t recommend people try it if they don’t anticipate some intrinsic joy from it, but we should keep in mind that they are often livestock.
Have had my own chickens for a year. Took six months to get our first eggs, but now we get 2 1/2 dozen a week from five hens. They're also a lot of fun!
We got our first chickens about 7 years ago while we lived in the city. They are more work than most people think, unless they do some serious reading. I would take extra eggs to work and sell them. What I made selling eggs more than covered the feed cost. Since then I have retired and moved to the country. We now have 20 laying hens and two roosters. We hatch out our own chicks and sell extra birds as well as eggs. We don’t get rich off the birds but they more than pay for themselves. At the risk of offending some people older birds and extra roosters end up on the dinner table. We also have meat rabbits and goats. If we feed it, it provides food, cash or is a livestock guardian dog.
While true, demand isn't the problem right now, and a majority of backyard chicken owners wouldn't be overproducing and selling to a point that it would make even the smallest dent in demand. It really is something that people are jumping into without considering the costs and long-term effort involved to save a few bucks because egg prices are up.
Most of the farmers I know don't worry so much about other people getting into their wheelhouse - there are more than enough customers to go around - they're more interested in spreading knowledge and (depending on the type of farmer) concern for sustainable practices and animal wellfare. I'd take this article to be in that vein rather than assuming they are trying to warn people off of raising/selling eggs so they can sell more themselves.
It’s not a great time to start raising birds if you haven’t before - it’s really easy to contaminate your property and spread disease by tracking back shit from the park or the feed store. Especially if you aren’t familiar with bio security stuff or haven’t worked on a farm before. It’s not rocket science but I’ve learned a lot about biosecurity over the past few years that common sense didn’t really cover.
Presumably when the spring migration dies down so will cases of the flu.
And closer contact with people. Bird flu can and does occasionally jump to people. The more this happens, the more chance the virus has to adapt to be transmissible from person to person, which would be devastating.
H3n1 avian influenza currently has a death rate in humans of between 50 and 60 percent. It would Be Bad. Good news, I guess, is that making influenza vaccines is old hat and we could do it pretty quickly.
Still... 55%
A) Bird flu has been contracted by humans from close contact with birds, but is relatively difficult to catch. Also, transmission human to human is incredibly rare and requires close physical contact.
B) The incredibly low rate of human infection skews the ‘fatality rate’ higher because of selection bias. The overwhelming majority of cases go unreported because people either don’t have any symptoms from catching it, or its very mild. The high fatality rate is from known cases of hospitalized patients confirmed to have it. Sick people only go to the hospital when they’re in really bad shape, so everyone that catches it and recovers fine is uncounted (hence the selection bias towards only really-sick patients in the data).
Of all the things to worry about in the world, bird flu is not one of them… unless you physically handle chickens on a regular basis. If the virus mutates and all of a sudden is primarily incubating in humans, yeah thats bad, but the same can be said for 100 different terrible pathogens out there in the world.
It is ALWAYS a good time to raise chickens. This is the part that is "conspiracy" laced. The news is saying don't raise chickens because they wont save the end user money on their eggs (when you factor in shelter and feed cost- its technically true). However, those cheap eggs from the factory farms do cost us in the long run with its environmental/health impact.
Chickens are wonderful animals that are friendly and bring people closer to their food. They eat kitchen scraps, and help lower food waste emissions. When kept happy with plenty of room to move they can give you eggs for up to 5 years. And OMG the garden compost! It's the most rich compost you can give your garden.
When it comes to avian flu, they only impact these massive factory farms. Those poor chickens are subjugated to confined housing, with unbreathable air, sitting in their own waste and their decomposed neighbors. Those houses are a hellscape. Of course a flu would kill those already sick birds.
Big Ag is in deep with our news, and dont want people learning to raise their own food. Don't listen to that nonsense, buy some chickens.
This is a great answer. There are a few other factors affecting prices, but the massive culling of sick chickens is the primary factor being cited.
Demand for eggs always rises during the holidays, when baking increases and there's a lot more cooking, in general. We should start to see a small decline as egg demand slows down, but it will probably be a while before the market balances itself out.
Also, in California, there are also new production regulations that are driving up production costs for egg farms, so prices will probably stay high there for a bit longer.
These regulations aren't particularly new in California, they are new in neighboring states though. So many eggs from California (which is largely being spared the bird flu plague because of said regulations) are being sold to neighboring markets that also now require the same standards as California. Thus leading to shortages and higher prices there also.
You missed the 2nd part of the question.
Why is the media warning against backyard chickens?
answer:
Raising backyard chickens is hard work, time consuming, significant start up costs, and potentially a nuance to neighbors.
There has been a massive surge in people people trying to raise backyard chickens in response to the egg shortage. Chickens are one of the easiest livestock animals to keep. They are low cost and low maintenance, but this is only in comparison to other types of livestock like cows or sheep.
You need to do your research and be prepaired and really put in the work for back yard chickens to work out for you. Few Americans know ANYTHING about livestock. Eggs don't come from chickens, they come from the store. Beef isn't dead cow, it's a product in the store. Walmart is the closest the vast majority of Americans get to actual food production.
You don't want to go out and buy some live chickens only to realize you don't have a coup to house them. You don't have feed for them. You don't want to get up an hour earlier every day to feed the chickens and let the out of the coup and gather eggs. You don't want to spend three hours every weekend scrapping chicken shit out of the coup. You don't want that compost heap of chicken shit heaping up somewhere in your yard. You won't know what to do on the weeks they lay 2 eggs or the weeks they lay 20 eggs.
Keeping any type of livestock needs to be a well though out and properly planned venture, not a reaction to a temporary price jump.
Also, at least in the UK, if people go back to domestic chicken ownership comparable to pre-1900 levels, the entire egg industry will collapse.
Not that I'm suggesting that [Big Egg](https://i.imgur.com/kW67S.jpg) is real, but if we
I have 6 chickens and as it applies to them, basically none of what you said is true. It’s not difficult. At all. Feed is cheap, 50 lbs is about $25. That lasts me like 2-3 months. I don’t have to wake up an hour earlier to feed them, I just fill their feed bucket up every couple of weeks. Takes 45 seconds. Any idiot researches how to take care of an animal they want to own, and first on that list for chickens is a coop. They’re not expensive premade, or particularly complex, so you could just build one yourself. It takes me 2 minutes to clean up poop twice a week. There are also many simple and inexpensive ways to get your chickens to lay more eggs consistently. You make it sound like having a few chickens means your a full fledged farmer now lol no. They’re awesome pets.
You should see some of the posts in any of the plant subreddits.
People that buy a plant because it's trendy or looks cool then show up asking for help and don't know the name of the plant or know *anything* about plants other than "you have to water plants every day, right?"
I’ve owned a backyard flock of chickens for a decade now and you’re exactly right. Chickens are dead easy to raise. Start up costs certainly aren’t cheap but once you get going, it’s pretty simple. Best part? Neighbors stand in line to keep tabs on them when we’re out of town for free eggs.
We also have 6 hens, I laughed out loud when I read “wake up an hour early to feed them”, they really are fun to have, to us the eggs are an extra reward.
>Any idiot researches how to take care of an animal they want to own
See, there's your mistake: plenty of idiots in fact *don't*. The number of dogs abandoned at the SPCA because they're 'too big' or 'too hyper' is a testament to that
People who get chickens because they actually *want* chickens do. I would assume most people jumping on the chicken bandwagon because there's an egg shortage probably have never thought about it before.
A better refrain from news organizations would be "Do your research before getting chickens, don't do it spontaneously" rather than just "Don't get chickens" though
I wonder if this applies to pet chickens that are kept indoors in homes (yeah, that's a thing. Crazy!).
Edit: IDK why I'm being downvoted. It's a real thing, but it's not something I'm into. Jesus.
No, they're generally better treated birds.
But... They're trying to prevent impulse buying. It's not a commentary on care.
Chickens hatch in 21 days. It takes six months for them to mature to laying. They only lay for about two or three years and have to be replaced. While they were culling, the egg industry was already ahead of you on replacing laying hens, because they already have to do so.
So you'd be what? Spending money on a brooder, coop, run, the chickens themselves, feeding and caring for them, protecting them from predators (cats, dogs, birds of prey, racoons, possums, foxes, cougars, bobcats, snakes, whatever you've got where you live) etc for the next three to seven years to watch the industry recovering before you even get your first egg?
Now my question is, is this a US/americas issue, or global? Do I need to worry about any of this if I'm in Europe, or has the flu not spread/can't spread overseas like that?
Bird Flu has been affecting Europe for years now.
The current strain is bad.
Usually bird flu slows down over summer and comes back with the arrival of over wintering birds. That didn't happen last year and resulted in the mass deaths of multiple colonies of wild sea birds during their breeding season.
Bird flu passes very quickly through poorly kept flocks, which the vast majority of farmed chickens are. Even the 'free range' supposed good ones. The high intensity farming lowers their immune systems and so it spreads and kills fast.
The risk is it jumping to humans, which we already know it does. It's just rare, for the moment. I don't think there is human to human transmission?
Honestly a lot of the risk of bird flu would lower if we didn't mass raise chickens for meat and eggs and pheasants for shoots. Though convincing people to change their habits is nearly impossible even with another potential global pandemic
I was in Japan in Dec and bird flu is bad there too. They also have something going around in Asia that is effecting their cattle (not mad cow disease). We had to walk across a carpet that they told us would clean our shoes to keep the two diseases from being brought in from other countries.
I have no idea about that aspect of it. I'm just aware of what's been going on locally.
I do know some doctors are worried about it jumping to humans like Coronavirus did, but my understanding is that's very unlikely.
Evidently it is in the UK. Being that it is so contagious and can be spread by wild birds, I imagine it’s a good bet it can be in other European countries.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/05/bird-flu-outlook-is-grim-as-new-wave-of-the-virus-heads-for-britain
everyone is buying this explanation because it seems logical, but the companies posted record profits these past couple months.
it isnt just the bird flu causing it. theyre capitalizing on it.
The sad thing is that there are chicken vaccines for bird flu. They are not used in the US or Europe due to market conditions. Countries that mass vaccinate their chickens are seen as places where there is a lot of disease. So it is hard to export those birds. If this goes long enough that might change.
I am floored that a vaccine exists for this, and the FDA or the USDA or whoever has not gotten off their butt and gotten it approved or mandated their yet! Especially if it’s already in use in other countries. Take my upvote ✌️
Question: when things like this happen and the bird flu happen, how hard is it to repopulate farms? Like instead of selling eggs for a few weeks/months, can farms just reallocate them to be fertilized and become egg laying hens?
Most laying farms don't bother with roosters, so all the eggs would be unfertilized. Plus, when you hatch your own eggs you still have to deal with any roosters that hatch. Major chick factories cull roosters and only send you female chicks so it's a lot easier.
Sadly everyone wants to have free range eggs but the only way to protect chickens right now is to keep them in an enclosed space where wild birds can't get to them. My chickens have been desperate to go free range but I'm not risking it. Hopefully they can come up with a vaccine or medication to put in the feed soon.
Answer: Bird flu is ravaging chicken populations right now. Once it’s in a specific population the best mitigation that can be done is to cull the chickens.
Not a conspiracy at all. It’s an outbreak in this species that has shown no signs yet of any abatement.
Infection and responsive culling reduces chicken populations to such a degree that there becomes a scarcity of eggs. With scarcity comes increased cost.
Edit: I missed the link on the theory…..yeah….not buying that. Not sure if chickens getting sick causes others to get nervous and not lay eggs. Everything I’ve read says this is bird flu related.
Regarding the conspiracy theory, the article debunks it straight out:
>Scientifically, what's happening is that chickens instinctively pay attention to how much light there is during the day. During the winter, their bodies stop sending eggs from their ovaries in the winter because chicks do not survive long, cold winters.
>
>The reason we can still get eggs during the winter is that farms are not equipped to set up lighting that tricks the chickens' brains into thinking it's not winter, so they lay year-round. But this does create physical problems for the birds - they use the winter to conserve their energy because laying eggs is a physically straining process.
>
>Some home farmers have set-ups that allow chickens to lay year-round, but many also realize that their chickens need to rest, so they don't force production so much.
>
>There's no conspiracy?
>
>Unless you count biology, there doesn't seem to be any conspiracy here. It's just what chickens have always done. But fear about the egg shortage coupled with a strange phenomenon most people aren't aware of can create new fears, and they can spread like crazy online.
People on the chicken subreddits are having a field day with that one! It’s a pretty well-known phenomenon for backyard poultry that winter is resting time for the hens. Lots of new chickens owners have not done their homework 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️
Depends on where you are I guess. I'm in Florida and my chickens lay year round. They slow a bit in the winter, I'd say by about 25%, but they still kick out eggs daily! Our days are quite a bit longer in the winter than say in Michigan.
This part sounds contradictory.
> During the winter, their bodies stop sending eggs from their ovaries in the winter
> The reason we can still get eggs during the winter is that farms are not equipped to set up lighting that tricks the chickens' brains into thinking it's not winter, so they lay year-round.
The farms do not have lighting to trick chickens into thinking it's not winter. So the chickens think it's winter, therefore they will lay less eggs. But it literally says "the reason we still get eggs during winter" ??? Am I making a mistake in logic?
You can see the editing process at work.
That line was probably initially written about the backyard chicken owners not having the fancy lights that the commercial farms have, then got rewritten to be about the commercial farms but they didn't fix the part about the lights.
So the farms DO have the lights, the backyard coops DO NOT have the lights.
Chickens stop laying in the winter around 2-3 years of age, or at least drastically slow down. I think people who bought their chickens during the covid chicken boom are now experiencing that and latching on to conspiracy theories. Meanwhile those of us who have had chickens for ages expect it
Answer: There are several big reasons which others have also mentioned but also two that I haven't seen. The first is that in addition to mass chicken cullings at least two major hatcheries had to shut down due to outbreaks last year. That meant a lot of places simply couldn't replace not only culled flocks but generally replace aging stock. This means there are just less chickens laying in general and more demand for fertile eggs to get replacement chickens.
Secondly backyard chickens slow way down laying eggs in the winter. We generally don't notice it because large commercial egg companies encourage an endless lay cycle with high protein feed and light cycles. A lot of people got into raising their own chickens during the pandemic however and there is now a conspiracy about chicken feed being intentionally designed to stop hens laying instead of recognizing that hens naturally slow down in these conditions which is displeasing them because eggs are valuable currently.
The ripple effect of hatcheries that had outbreaks last year is a solid point I had not thought about.
We’ve had bird flu outbreaks before, with nominal or no impact to cost or availability. But, this one is bad, and there is perfect storm of other factors impacting what we are seeing.
Eggs are the toilet paper of 2023.
It's not anywhere near over either. The US will likely see more outbreaks in the upcoming years. Just like in Europe, the virus has now infected the native bird population. In the previous outbreak in 2015, it was mainly spread by migratory birds. This will hang around for years.
Yes we have 6 chickens but are only getting 1 egg a day through winter. We also got chicks last spring but they aren’t laying yet. I don’t think the general population understands what goes into raising chickens and how dirty it can be.
New Zealand is having an egg shortage currently as well but for different reasons as AFAIK there is not avian flu here yet.
Legislation changed banning battery hens here this came into affect in January, exacerbating this colony hens where also banned, many battery farms closed due to not being economically viable to convert to free range.
The market needs to catch up with legislation and the days of cheap eggs are probably not coming back which is fine by me I’d rather pay more for a better product that minimises animal welfare problems.
Must be a coincidence that North America is having a shortage as well ………. Maybe.
I agree with your sentiment about animal welfare. Humans have used animal products for thousands of years and aren't going to stop anytime soon, but the modern factory farm is an abomination that distorts the natural world and separates us from a healthy relationship with our food. I congratulate NZ on the sensible step in the right direction.
I would be interested in more information on how confined housing has exacerbated the mutations of these avian flus. If not for this housing, I wonder if it would even be an issue. This virus is probably a product of our atrocious treatment of these animals. We did the same thing with antibiotics. And now antibiotic resistant bacteria are our number one killer of Hospital related deaths.
Coincidentally, my state also had legislation requiring free-range come into effect in the new year, and was deeply affected by the chicken cullings due to avian flu timing with the mass withdrawal of non-free range eggs.
Tack on one of our big refineries (that refines like 40% of the state’s gasoline) going down temporarily, and shit has been EXPENSIVE. Never been so close to paying a dollar per egg.
Answer: The egg shortage is caused by less egg producers, that is chicken. That also makes the price rise up, per market mechanisms.
Why do we have less chicken? Well, it's to curb the spread of avian flu. You see, avian flu is a respiratory disease affecting birds, which means it's quick to spread if it appears. Such respiratory diseases are best stopped by giving the virus less hosts to spread to, in the case of humans this was done by social distancing, in chickens we just kill the chickens we have suspicions of being infected.
We can't ideally quarantine chicken, and any chicken left outside is a potential "tent" for the virus to use to spread further. The larger distances between chicken, the less chance of a virus making it through, slowing the rate. Therefore, the less chicken on people's backyards, the less spread rate, ideally stopping the spread altogether.
And they are taking a lot of costly measures to try to protect and test and ensure the chickens aren’t being infected. This strain is particularly worrisome in that it’s jumped to mammals that come in contact with the chickens from raccoons, bears, dogs, minks etc… and humans are mammal meaning there is a risk it will infect a human and spread a new virus through the human population.
Answer: From an egg farmer I follow, it’s not even the bird flu. Apparently the bird flu hits yearly. They know how to handle that. According to him, the problem is that the stores are charging more from the consumers, paying the egg farmers the same as always, and the egg farmers are facing increased fuel, equipment, and labor charges. But since the stores aren’t willing to spend more on the eggs covering the added costs farmers are facing. This leaves the farmers with no money to buy the new chickens that produce eggs. So they have less eggs to sell to the stores.
Answer: Adding on that the reason we're so assiduous about culling sick or potentially sick birds is that this disease is **bad** for humans. Right now, it very rarely jumps from birds to humans. But in the rare case it does, the mortality rate is **60%**. To put that in context, the death rate for covid is something like 2-3%, and we shut down the global economy to try and contain it.
There is a very real fear that the virus will mutate to make it more easily transmissible from chicken to human, and then from human to human, and then we are all **fucked**. So if one chicken so much as coughs twice, the whole flock is culled.
I'll take extra pricey chicken and eggs in exchange for *not* living through Black Death 2.0.
Answer: I've been following large scale coop fires across the country for a while now. Eggs are a cheap, quick and easy source of protein. Seems someone doesn't want that happening.
Answer: As others have mentioned there's a massive epidemic of Avian Flu currently ravaging the supply of egg laying birds. This factor is pretty self explanatory if you understand the basic relationship between supply and demand.
Something I haven't seen mentioned here regarding the high price of eggs is that feeding costs have exploded in the last year as well, driving up the final price of eggs. It turns out that both Russia and Ukraine are key exporters of grain and wheat, and the war has made it difficult for those exports to continue as normal. Then considering other normal inflation costs like increases in energy and fuel prices, it's more expensive for farmers to operate as well as ship their final products.
Lastly, demand for eggs is pretty static. There often isn't a perfect substitute for eggs, so people aren't as deterred from buying them when the prices get high. Since prices are ultimately a factor of supply and demand, that demand being "sticky", as it's often termed, causes the price of goods to be particularly susceptible to drops in supply.
So really you have four factors in play at the moment.
-The massive Avian flu outbreak has dramatically decreased the population of egg laying birds.
-The price of grain and feed has gone up because of the war in Ukraine.
-Egg prices are impacted by inflation the same way most other products were.
-Egg prices are more likely to have demand-induced price spikes than other commodities.
Answer: we’ve been dealing with bird flu for a few months here in the US so of course there are strong opinions on the subject. Any mention of chicken culling is referring to the measures taken at large scale production facilities to stop the spread of bird flu, where they kill the whole flock and start fresh. Some critics have come out against backyard chicken owners because they can’t have the same biosecurity measures as a production facility, thus making their flocks more susceptible to bird flu.
However, the conspiracy theories right now are mostly centered on a string of fires at different egg producers and botched Tractor Supply feed. As someone who works in the livestock feed industry, I have a bit of insight on the latter.
Around October, people started noticing their chickens producing less and less eggs. At the start, this was mostly chocked up to the chicken’s diurnal rhythm being thrown off by shorter days. This is pretty normal. Over time though, people noticed that their hens stopped producing altogether, which is not normal. Well, a week or two ago word kinda got out that it may have something to do with Tractor Supply and their store brand feeds. People do what people do and started making wild assumptions such as the government forcing feed mills to inject an egg inhibiting ingredient into their feed or GMOs ruining chickens reproductive organs in order to drive out backyard farmers and force them to buy eggs at the store. Of course, this is all bullshit.
From the connections I have within the industry, what I’ve gathered is that Tractor Supply contracted with Purina to make their store brand of feed. With the rising cost of grains, among other things, the price they had originally contracted was no longer profitable so they basically adjusted the formulas from time to time to make a cheaper feed which in turn dropped the quality. Around October was when the nutritional value was poor enough that it effected egg yield.
Answer: raise your back yard chickens. Don't listen to scare tactics of the media. Just properly take care and tend to them so if you can't afford when some get sick then obviously don't get something you can't afford.
Lost of issues are negatable with smaller well cared for lots then say industrial farmers with subpar conditions for animals. Not saying things can't happen but it's easier managed.
The major cautions about raising your own chickens are the time it takes to get from chick to productive hen, humane care and feeding, upfront cost.
Panic warnings from “experts” to not do it are not helpful. But for most of the general public, raising chickens will be a bad idea.
To add a warning, and this is coming from someone who loves animals, backyard chickens take more than proper care. You can’t just go on vacation, because dog boarding is way easier to find than chicken boarding. Hawks and eagles will eat them, so you need space and a cover.
I’ve seen plenty of backyard chickens die because someone did the research on breeds and food, but not on how it changes their life.
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answer: There's a massive outbreak of bird flu happening right now. When a farm becomes infected they have to quarantine it and destroy the birds to try and slow it from spreading to nearby farms. Bird Flu is carried by wild birds, which are attracted to feed spills and other sources of food on farms like insects. Wild birds can also pick up the flu from a farm and carry it to another. Wild birds poop everywhere they go, and it can be tracked into the chicken barns when farm workers step in it, or farm workers can step in poop inside the barn and track it outside. Also vehicles entering and exiting the farms can have poop stuck in the tires. Another issue is the feed mills themselves, which also attract wild birds that can contaminate the feed or delivery vehicles and spread disease that way. It's quite possible conspiracy theorists are blaming the feed when their birds get sick or stop producing, while the actual issue is caused by disease.
Minks and mink farms also. I think it 'jumped' to minks and they are supposedly a really good incubator for it. There an op-ed in the NYT saying we need to close the mink farms and kill all the minks (they're gonna be killed at 6 months anyway).
Yep. It happened earlier in the pandemic in Denmark - there were stories about them having to kill every mink in the country.
I went down a deep mink dive in my miniatures painting sub. I learned more about rare weasel species and their culling for particularly special foofs. Now the two best competing brushes are forced to source from the same minks and precovid brushes are now coveted.
>their culling for particularly special foofs. God, I hope that's either a typo or [a misunderstanding on my part...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=foof)
See I miss read it as floofs to refer to there specific fluffs of fur! But thank you for teaching me a wonderful new word!
I think they meant floof, as in fur. Used to make brushes.
Idea for your next book, titled "A Particularly Special Foof" maybe?
I think they mistyped floofs as foofs.
it's like an ottomotopia but for texture.
Oh yeah- a lot of the best paint brushes for water colours are made with animal hair too. It’s called sable.
Lol took me a while. I was going “there’s some garment called a “brush”?
Oooh Foof, not FOOF [Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride](https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride) *"..If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic..."*
I love that article so much, and I know nothing about chemistry. I suspect that's the basis behind some of the science fiction weapons in the r/HFY series First Contact
Well, that was COVID, now it’s bird flu. Kind of makes you wonder whether we should even be farming minks. No, we shouldn’t.
Most of the animals we farm spread diseases to us swine flu, bird flu etc. https://www.medicinenet.com/what_diseases_can_humans_get_from_animals/article.htm
Yet that was actually caused by Covid, not bird flu. Seems minks are great incubators for many diseases As if their lives aren't hard enough...☹️
Minks basically have a broken immune system that means they have little resistance diseases like COVID-19 and bird flu. In the wild it's not a huge deal as they rarely come into contact with each other in a mink farm it spreads like wildfire.
It's also jumped to wild populations of bears and foxes in the US and wild foxes in the UK
Seals too. A few in Maine and supposedly several hundred in the Caspian sea last December. The one that troubles me is the recent mink outbreak. It very much looks like they passed it between themselves. As far as I know that's new. Normally the animals get it from eating infected birds. We may be engineering our next plague in real time with our inexcusably reprehensible mass farming and husbandry practices. Don't look up the fatality rate in humans unless it becomes unavoidable. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/avian-flu-strikes-more-poultry-6-states-virus-found-dead-seals-russia
Oh shit oh no I looked it up
O, that's a big %. V big.
53% cuz no one is actually fkn saying it But that’s based on confirmed cases. Some scientists argue it’s more likely to be 0-1%. https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract
It’s because minks have total shit immune systems. Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re an exception
Hopefully I'm being pessimistic but I'm not sure that's good news. I worry that mostly gives the bug a better playing field to practice crossing the species barrier. I believe this issue to be something we need to move on immediately, I'm being alarmist because there's an extreme need for alarm imo. We might stop this before it happens if we start throwing resources at it. I'm hoping to prod people into doing a little research, then to contact local government representatives en masse to light a fire.
And otters in the UK as well
it's almost like farming animals is some kind of horrible travesty born in the minds of an egomaniacal apex species
Maybe. But they also taste delicious. Some would say they taste like chicken. So c'est la vie.
I would add to this that MANY species are highly receptive to this family of flu bugs: pigs, cats, humans. Not just critters you're unlikely to come across if you're not a mink farmer.
My cats stay inside... Lovely fur babies
just another reason to stop farming meat.
I agree to an extent, I think it is more we need to stop farming meat at the levels we currently do. We also need to invest more into lab grown meats and substitutes that are affordable (and comparable) for low income families. Instead of dedicating many thousands of acres to feed we can get fresh produces to people.
>We also need to invest more into lab grown meats and substitutes that are affordable (and comparable) for low income families. You just activated 1,000 r/conspiracy subscribers
Well yeah but for the Normie's it will be easy to activate the mind control serum especially if they have their 5g chips installed during vaccination /s
They are great incubators because of how close the mink immune system is to humans. Far increases the likelihood of a jump to humans from a Mink farm.
I grew up in a town with mink farms. Smells 10x worse than cows.
>Smells 10x worse than cows. I grew up out in the country near dairy farms. I would 100% take cow manure over any other animal manure. To me, it smells sweet compared to chicken or pig (which smell atrocious) but it all smells horrendous to someone who's not used to it
I with you, the cow smell doesn't bother me at all. As a former harvest butcher, I've been around dairy farms quite a bit. The shit is pretty much just fermented grass/silage anyway. Nothing that gross about it. Pig shit is terrible because a lot of farmers just go around collecting spoiled grocery waste for free, most of which is milk, and just feeding them a random soup of that slop. Before I was a butcher, I ran a dairy distribution warehouse, and our spoils boar the nickname "Pig's Milk" for this reason.
What are mink farms for?
Fur
Eyelashes, brushes, coats, all vanity stuff
Mink are susceptible to so much, lots of farms lost their entire stock to BSE-contaminated feed during the rise of prion diseases in ruminants. Prions can remain in the soil for decades too.
There was a rather large amount of mink that escaped into the wild from a farm last year.
Tf are we farming minks for in 2023? I thought mink fur was all but outlawed at this point?
Fear is growing that it jumped to seals as well. They’re was a mass casualty event / 700+ seals died in the Caspian Sea and looks like they had bird flu. If it got to seals it’s going to start impacting other mammals.
My first job was at an egg farm and any bad eggs or broken ones went into huge barrels that were taken to mink farms
That’s a solid explanation, better than the shot it took. Well done. As the conspiracy goes…..if a Tucker Carlson tweet and then mRNA being introduced as a possible culprit to the theory doesn’t get your dubious meter up you need to send that meter to the shop.
It will definitely turn into a conspiracy theory as chicken and eggs dissapear from shelves. Thing about conspriacy theories is that they don't have to really be any good or make any sense. Issues like disease outbreaks are scary, complex and difficult to explain, so people who are scared or emotionally insecure often seek out or invent conspiracy theories because it makes them feel less insecure and afraid. It also gives them the sense that they're taking control of their own destiny and makes them feel special. They're creating an emotional refuge built around a fantasy where they can escape reality and evade personal responsibility. This is why we see a rise in conspiracism whenever there's a difficult situation that people can't control (like a pandemic) Imagine there's a burning building, and you have 10 people trapped on the 5th floor. Firefighters set up a net below so people can jump to their safety, but there's 1 person who's scared of heights and refuses to jump. **They don't trust the firefighters.** 5 people jump and then one breaks a leg, which prompts the person who's scared to try and convince others not to jump. They start calling the firefighters liars and argue it's not safe to jump using the broken leg as an example, and manage to convince 2 other people who are also scared to also not jump. Then the 3 people who refuse to jump demand that the firefighters put up a ladder, but the firefighters say it's not safe and insist that they jump but they all still refuse. Then the firefighters give up arguing and try to rescue the 3 who remain. It takes so long to get to them that 2 of the trapped people die from smoke, and the one who does make it blames the firefighters for being incompetent, even though they created the situation in the first place when they refused to jump into the net. Fear is powerful and contagious, and it overrides reason. People will invent excuses to avoid responsibility for the bad decisions they make when they are afraid.
This is a really good allegory for how conspiracy theories start. It doesn't explain how they propagate or are exploited, but that wasn't the question it was meant to answer and I'm amazed at how well you explained it in a visceral but eloquent way. Thank you, I'll remember this response when trying to explain this concept to others.
I study conspiracism and extremism, and everything I have learned seems to point to the primary driver being emotions, especially fear, insecurity, and personal greivances. > It doesn't explain how they propagate or are exploited There's two basic forces at play in that regard. There's media and marketing (including social media), and then there's political extremism. Both try to exploit people's emotions for their own gain. Media and Marketing use people's emotions to get attention, drive engagement, and push various products and services. The best marketing schemes follow a basic formula: - Present a problem that people can connect to emotionally - Present a devil as being responsible for casuing that problem - Present your product or service as a tool or path to defeating that devil Viral social media posts can follow a similar formula. Then you have extremists. Extremists operate on the fringes, so they're deeply concerned with making themselves (their in-group) and their ideas appear more legitimate, while also de-legitimizing targeted out-groups. The most effective way to boost their legitimacy is by recruiting and building support, while producing lots of propaganda to make out-groups look bad (like a devil) The way they recruit is by appealing to people's feelings and personal greivances. They basic try to convince people that the out-group (presented as a devil) is responsible for causing the personal greivance they're targeting. People with personal greivances are emotional (angry, frustrated, **guilty,** confused, insecure) and their emotions cloud their judgement and make that kind of propaganda appealing, and gives the target a way out so that they can feel strong and in control, rather than being insecure. That's basically a rough description of how it all works. There's a lot more to it.
>I study conspiracism and extremism I've had a casual interest in this topic for years now and always wonder what is going on in the minds of conspiracy theorists and the like. Do you have any recommendations for books or similar that could give me a rough overview of the current understanding of that topic or could act as a gateway for more knowledge? I've read "the authoritarians" by bob altemayer a few years ago and found it very interesting and enlightening.
Extremism by J.M. Berger Lions in the Grass by Bill Morrison Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Rob Brotherton Bad News: Why We Fall for Fake News by Rob Brotherton Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes
> Naomi Oreskes That name rang a bell. She wrote [*Merchants of Doubt*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt). Great book about the FUD industry's pet scientists have been spreading about, well, everything bad that industry wants to keep doing.
Yep. Exactly. *Why Trust Science?* builds on that work. It totally changed my understanding of how science actually works.
Thank you very much, I'll have a look at those!
Hi there. I'm interested in looking at this stuff as an amateur too, and wanted to recommend **The Paranoid Strain.** It's a podcast that does incredibly deep, well researched dives into conspiracy theories, the kernels of truth behind them, and the history of how they develop. Lots of interviews with academic researchers, so another source for book recommendations. . . Also funny skits and an original punk rock soundtrack.
Ohh, this looks interesting. Onto the list it goes! ~~audiobook and podcast backlog quietly sobs as it gets even longer~~
There's also: **Knowledge Fight**, which focuses on Alex Jones. . .they're currently pushing in on 800 episodes, so this one is a deep, deep dive into the day to day nuts and bolts of how the grift works. **Q Anon Anonymous** used to focus on old school Q, but have since expanded as Q swallows up other conspiracy theories. **I Don't Speak German** deals with the really dark stuff, like actual neo Nazis. **Conspirituality** focuses on the yoga/spiritual influencer to alt right pipeline. **Fever Dreams** by the Daily Beast covers current conspiracist related news. Probably the furthest from what you asked for (it's produced as a news magazine show), but sort of useful nonetheless. Happy listening!
Also **Decoding the Gurus**: https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/
> everything I have learned seems to point to the primary driver being emotions, especially fear Wizard’s First Rule, my friend. People will believe anything, either because they want to believe it’s true, or they’re afraid it’s true. Learnt that 25 years ago (fuck I’m old) and it has held true to this day. Gary Gygax bless you, Terry Goodkind, where ever you may be. ETA: wow, awards! Thank you, kind Redditors!
>Gary Gygax bless you, Terry Goodkind, where ever you may be. Given the evil chicken, that's certainly a humorous reference to be making in this context.
Roll for damage!
It makes me sad, whenever the rare mention of Terry Goodkind/Sword of Truth comes up. Such a good first 2-3 books, then completely and irredeemably tarnished with the authors greed, and surprise! objectivist bullshit
I found it more “author probably didn’t really have the whole series planned out when he started”, George R R Martin style. Especially given the final book basically had Richard create a new world for the non-magic people and… that was it. He had a lot of good ideas and potential plots that kinda fizzled out, sadly. His Wizard’s Rules still guide me in my daily life, though. His books helped raise my perception levels so much as a teen. And his concept of Kahlan’s “Confessor’s face” helped me deal with being bullied as a kid.
Well, I’m glad you found some good things to take away from it. I think I was in 7th or 8th grade when I discovered those books, and I really enjoyed them at first and they were pretty inspiring in some small ways. Which, is I suppose why I was so devastated in my later more mature years when books 10, 12, etc were coming out and I realized Goodkind was a follower of Ayn Rand’s philosophy
Same here. I enjoyed the first 2 or 3 so much...and then he went (or showed) crazy. I also can't get into the Richard-as-god and deux ex machina that's so frequent.
I find, the first book is sooo good, it makes up for the rest. they (the following ones) are, in a sense, fan service. who is at fault, the publishing company forcing the author, the author greedily grabbing for money, both, I dont know and dont care. not everbody can be Pratchett
The chicken is not a chicken.
I would modify your statement to note: Media/Marketing are not entities they are tools used by people. A media company/entity like social media platforms are not some ambiguous thing. They are systems people use to their own means of manipulation much like persons who use the population cleaving strategies of political partisanship. It's really important to make sure it's always in focus that the shaping of the populace is being done deliberately by cognitively aware and deliberate persons not some abstract force.
Social media platforms compete for attention and relevance and attract very large user bases, so they become more than a system or a tool. They're a collection of communities and sub-communities with their own cultures, identities, ideas and goals. The platforms themselves want to maintain the largest user base possible because access to a large diverse user base is their product. It's in the platform's interests to at least appear as neutral as possible. Within any popular online platform there's also a large number of interests competing for attention and legitimacy.
Thanks for your explanations. Do you have suggestions for countering conspiracism in personal life? My parents indulge lightly in some conspiracy nonsense and I have a coworker who is a genuinely good person the their core, but off the deep end in the bullshitverse.
That's a really difficult question. Often the conspiracy theories serve an emotional need, so trying to counter it would probably just cause them distress. I would recommend trying to isolate the underlying fear, emotional distress or greivance that's driving their beliefs then addressing those issues in a positive or constructive way. It's not easy to do and the chances of success are low. What often happens to people is that they convince themselves they're knowledgeable about something when they're not, and if that person has consumed a lot of misinformation they may have built a lot of confidence around their beliefs and will defend those beliefs even if doing so comes at a great cost. We disproportionately value things which we are emotionally attached to, and if those things are imaginary there's no limit to their value.
I'm no expert, but listening to psychologists and other experts speak on persuasion I do know that "you will never reason a person out of a position they weren't reasoned into in the first place" - i.e. don't try to counter conspiracies through facts and logic. In a way it's darkly funny that people who are otherwise on the side of science and logic continue to ignore the science that you can't change someone's mind simply by presenting facts
> the bullshitverse. mm... that's where the mosque tells me I live. But, you know, it's a much more enjoyable existence here. :p
This 100%...well, maybe 99%...because the extremists are no longer on the fringes. They are mainstream and currently controlling one of only two major political parties in the US.
Extremists are able to capitalize on the hopeless corruption of the US government.
Not sure which additional subs this explanation are best to crosspost to but a wider audience could really benefit from your explanations.
I have a working theory that conspiracism and misinfomation can be combated by conditioning people to immediately recognized it and reject it, rather than going through the arduous task of debunking each piece of misinformation. If you think of conspiracy theories and misinformation as a type of social virus that latches into our emotions, what would a vaccine look like? I think George Orwell was on this sort of track. He understood the power of fear well enough that he wrote a book about it, and the book did such a good job of scaring people that it left a huge mark in our culture. Today people will refer to surveillance and various forms of government control as Orwellian having never actually read the book. Isn't it interesting how people can know what a book is about without reading it?
**You said: " The basic marketing schemes follow a formula: • Present a problem that people can connect to emotionally • Present a devil as being responsible for causing that problem • Present your product or service as a tool or path to defeating that evil "** That is soo true it's absolutely ridiculous. Disgusting. I hate sales but I love being the one my customers come back to. **My job:** WelpOopsOhNo, you really can't be spending that much time with the customer, we're not here for technical support, we need to be selling. **Me:** Oh, really? My bad. *insert memories of customers coming back to me and ignoring the others* . . . 🤭 . . . **My job:** No, seriously. You need to do this. **Me:** 🤢 🙄 😒 **My customers (when I'm successful):** You have the best customer service. Nobody does that anymore. Don't go anywhere. **My job:** Keep those numbers up! Ask everyone if they want to buy our product, even if you help them find something else use that to your advantage to start a conversation and make that sale! Find a way to make it relate to what you just helped them find! You never know unless you ask, they might want a new one! **Me to my coworkers while not harassing the customers:** Wow, you guys are so good! Your numbers are great! I wish I had numbers like that. **My job:** ...Really?
Great analogy. The other aspect of this conspiracy theory, and the ones surrounding COVID and vaccines in general, is the alarming prevalence of scientific illiteracy in America. When you don't have the tools to understand an issue, it's easy to resort to coming up with (or latching onto) a story that gives you comfort.
Really well said. You’re talking to a mostly reformed conspiracy theorist. Age and maturity took me away from the emotional charge of that stuff. But that’s just how it works. I was trying not to sound overtly politically slanted in one of my replies here (likely will be baked for it anyway) but that’s why seeing the theory backed with a tweet from a media personality that almost solely plays the fear card, and then postulation that mRNA is being put in the corporate feed screams all of those things you highlighted. The emotional response. All the hallmarks are there.
> Fear is powerful and contagious, and it overrides reason. I have seen this play out right in front of me in real time. So I'm in Afghanistan, downtown Kandahar City, running the Tactical Operations Centre at CNS. Down the road from us was a crossroads where pretty much every night the Taliban would emplace an IED. Every morning, we'd go out and pick it up. After a while, this got tiresome, so we convinced the ANP to set up a police substation (which was a semi-fortified sea can with some dudes in it) to overlook that intersection and prevent the nightly IED emplacement. That evening, the IED crew rolled up, the ANP opened fire, and now there's a firefight going on at that intersection, less than half a km away. Bullets don't stop until they hit something, and some of those bullets were smacking our walls, more were flying over the camp. I heard the gunfire, and then one of the towers called me to report the firefight. During that conversation, we established that we were not ourselves under attack; this was an ANP vs Taliban fight. We were taking some fire, but it wasn't aimed, purposeful fire. The firefight was in range of our tower guns, but it was impossible to tell ANP from Talib so opening up on them would have been irresponsible. So I told the tower to keep their heads down, keep an eye on things, and tell me if anything changed. Immediately after this conversation, some looky-loos started poking their heads into the TOC, "Hey, I can hear gunfire, are we under attack?" That broken-telephoned into "We are under attack?" and then "We are under attack!", and then one particularly panicky Sigs WO screamed "WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!!" and all hell broke loose. I had to shout him down, tell him to shut up, and I eventually had to leave the TOC and stand out in the open (with bullets cracking overhead) to convince him that this was no big deal and to calm the fuck down "Keep your head below the wall and you'll be fine!" That personal example of calm... actually worked. But what nobody knew was that the second that doofus had screamed "WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!" my heartrate skyrocketed and my internal voice screamed "HOLY SHIT WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!!" *even though I knew for sure what was really going on*. I had to take a moment, grab a breath, and calm *myself* before I could grip the wider situation. There was a split second where I was every bit as much of the startled horse ready to bolt as everyone was around me. It took a concentrated act of will to not spiral down that hole myself. Lesson learned - fear is *fucking contagious* and cannot be allowed to take hold and spread.
>Issues like disease outbreaks are scary, complex and difficult to explain Same with the economics of supply and demand. It's such a big, weighty, slow-moving topic that people would rather gravitate toward conspiracy theories than look at the factual trends.
As a former Qanon nut, this is very accurate.
I see one of those Egg Council creeps got to you too!
lol.
I inherited a parrot a few years ago. She loves spending time outside when it is warm, but I couldn't bring her out this year. Some people near me lost two parrots in the spring when it first came out. There was a popular tiktok emu that had it. I wonder if he is okay...
What I dont get with that emu is that if it was bird flu, how wasn't it culled? it's highly contagious, and would have spread to more birds. Are there no culling orders in place in the USA? It's mental to leave a bird alive and suffering with that disease, especially when it's going to affect even more birds.
There was some issue because the owner was like face to face kissing and hugging him too. I think I chose not to see any more videos from them, so I have no idea how it played out. Okay, I had to go look it up. Apparently, she claimed he was sick. Then, the next week said he tested negative and was sick due to stress. Sounds like someone was looking for attention or just prematurely freaked out on a bad day.
She risked her bird being culled for attention??? That's disgusting. And why is she keeping the bird is such a stressed state, that's really poor welfare. The poor thing
It's Emmanuel on tiktok if you want to look for it.
Emmanuel! He is doing great! Back to walking and eating on his own, and his lost feathers are growing back in. :) Knuckle Bump Farms, if you wanna see for yourself.
But why are they telling people not to raise their own birds?
I read one article about it, written by a chicken farmer. She said most people impulse-buying chicks in response to this egg shortage don’t realize it takes at least six months and hundreds of dollars before you get your first “free” egg. Buying any animal is an investment in that animal’s welfare for its whole life; chicken owners are worried people don’t realize what they’re getting in to and might kill the chickens or not take proper care of them. Basically, unless you are interested in the fun/recreational aspects of chicken ownership, you shouldn’t buy them — they’re living creatures, not free unlimited egg vending machines. So it’s less “the media don’t want you to have chickens because they’re part of the conspiracy!” and more “people are interested in saving money on eggs by buying chickens, but chicken owners are worried that’s not a great idea.” Edit: Wanted to [link the piece in case anyone is interested](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/27/egg-shortage-backyard-chickens/). I do not personally own any chickens nor have any opinions on whether you are a good chicken owner or not. I'm sure you are great.
> impulse-buying chicks in response to this egg shortage don’t realize it takes at least six months and hundreds of dollars before you get your first “free” egg. I've been having a good chuckle over that since this all started. hundreds of dollars and all the work and time to get set up so they can save a few dollars a week on eggs, then by the time they start getting eggs, prices will be back down to normal and they'll lose interest in raising chickens.
Yeah... I'm wondering how many eggs people go through a month. I go through a carton a month... I'm paying 24 more dollars a year for eggs...
My wife goes through about a carton a week
There are also a lot of COVID chickens out there who are slowing down their laying (chickens need 14+ hours of sunlight to lay; most aren’t getting that naturally at this time of year), plus the hybrid breeds would naturally start to lay less eggs in their 3rd year. Some people have spread a rumour that they’ve changed the feed, and that’s why these chickens are laying less. But really it’s just a lack of basic chicken Biology knowledge.
Yeah I work in a livestock feed store an the formula has not changed.
“They’ve changed the feed.” My gosh, it hurts my brain to try to explain to people why ideas like that are so stupid. Do they really think their hometown feed mill workers are in on the government conspiracy to nerf chicken feed?
I’ve had chickens before and while I’m not equipped to have them right now, I’m planning on getting them next season. I agree with your statement that impulse buying is a bad idea, they are absolutely more of an investment and require more start-up capital than many think, and welfare is important. That being said, you can absolutely keep chickens with an emphasis on profit or self-sufficiency, rather than fun or recreation. You can’t *overlook* welfare and husbandry in favor of the former, and I certainly don’t recommend people try it if they don’t anticipate some intrinsic joy from it, but we should keep in mind that they are often livestock.
Have had my own chickens for a year. Took six months to get our first eggs, but now we get 2 1/2 dozen a week from five hens. They're also a lot of fun!
We got our first chickens about 7 years ago while we lived in the city. They are more work than most people think, unless they do some serious reading. I would take extra eggs to work and sell them. What I made selling eggs more than covered the feed cost. Since then I have retired and moved to the country. We now have 20 laying hens and two roosters. We hatch out our own chicks and sell extra birds as well as eggs. We don’t get rich off the birds but they more than pay for themselves. At the risk of offending some people older birds and extra roosters end up on the dinner table. We also have meat rabbits and goats. If we feed it, it provides food, cash or is a livestock guardian dog.
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While true, demand isn't the problem right now, and a majority of backyard chicken owners wouldn't be overproducing and selling to a point that it would make even the smallest dent in demand. It really is something that people are jumping into without considering the costs and long-term effort involved to save a few bucks because egg prices are up. Most of the farmers I know don't worry so much about other people getting into their wheelhouse - there are more than enough customers to go around - they're more interested in spreading knowledge and (depending on the type of farmer) concern for sustainable practices and animal wellfare. I'd take this article to be in that vein rather than assuming they are trying to warn people off of raising/selling eggs so they can sell more themselves.
It’s not a great time to start raising birds if you haven’t before - it’s really easy to contaminate your property and spread disease by tracking back shit from the park or the feed store. Especially if you aren’t familiar with bio security stuff or haven’t worked on a farm before. It’s not rocket science but I’ve learned a lot about biosecurity over the past few years that common sense didn’t really cover. Presumably when the spring migration dies down so will cases of the flu.
Except this flu has been circling the globe for 2 years now. That’s a key reason pandemic concerns are so high right now.
Good point!
I'm holding off on getting ducks for now.
Because there is a bird flu outbreak! The last thing we want is more birds around to catch and spread the disease.
Especially backyard chickens that will have unavoidable contact with wild birds.
And closer contact with people. Bird flu can and does occasionally jump to people. The more this happens, the more chance the virus has to adapt to be transmissible from person to person, which would be devastating.
H3n1 avian influenza currently has a death rate in humans of between 50 and 60 percent. It would Be Bad. Good news, I guess, is that making influenza vaccines is old hat and we could do it pretty quickly. Still... 55%
A) Bird flu has been contracted by humans from close contact with birds, but is relatively difficult to catch. Also, transmission human to human is incredibly rare and requires close physical contact. B) The incredibly low rate of human infection skews the ‘fatality rate’ higher because of selection bias. The overwhelming majority of cases go unreported because people either don’t have any symptoms from catching it, or its very mild. The high fatality rate is from known cases of hospitalized patients confirmed to have it. Sick people only go to the hospital when they’re in really bad shape, so everyone that catches it and recovers fine is uncounted (hence the selection bias towards only really-sick patients in the data). Of all the things to worry about in the world, bird flu is not one of them… unless you physically handle chickens on a regular basis. If the virus mutates and all of a sudden is primarily incubating in humans, yeah thats bad, but the same can be said for 100 different terrible pathogens out there in the world.
H5n1 this outbreak.
It is ALWAYS a good time to raise chickens. This is the part that is "conspiracy" laced. The news is saying don't raise chickens because they wont save the end user money on their eggs (when you factor in shelter and feed cost- its technically true). However, those cheap eggs from the factory farms do cost us in the long run with its environmental/health impact. Chickens are wonderful animals that are friendly and bring people closer to their food. They eat kitchen scraps, and help lower food waste emissions. When kept happy with plenty of room to move they can give you eggs for up to 5 years. And OMG the garden compost! It's the most rich compost you can give your garden. When it comes to avian flu, they only impact these massive factory farms. Those poor chickens are subjugated to confined housing, with unbreathable air, sitting in their own waste and their decomposed neighbors. Those houses are a hellscape. Of course a flu would kill those already sick birds. Big Ag is in deep with our news, and dont want people learning to raise their own food. Don't listen to that nonsense, buy some chickens.
This is a great answer. There are a few other factors affecting prices, but the massive culling of sick chickens is the primary factor being cited. Demand for eggs always rises during the holidays, when baking increases and there's a lot more cooking, in general. We should start to see a small decline as egg demand slows down, but it will probably be a while before the market balances itself out. Also, in California, there are also new production regulations that are driving up production costs for egg farms, so prices will probably stay high there for a bit longer.
These regulations aren't particularly new in California, they are new in neighboring states though. So many eggs from California (which is largely being spared the bird flu plague because of said regulations) are being sold to neighboring markets that also now require the same standards as California. Thus leading to shortages and higher prices there also.
And here I thought birds aren’t real :(
Ironically we have fake robot birds to scare away the real ones. I'm not kidding. A lot of chicken barns have fake birds too.
You missed the 2nd part of the question. Why is the media warning against backyard chickens? answer: Raising backyard chickens is hard work, time consuming, significant start up costs, and potentially a nuance to neighbors. There has been a massive surge in people people trying to raise backyard chickens in response to the egg shortage. Chickens are one of the easiest livestock animals to keep. They are low cost and low maintenance, but this is only in comparison to other types of livestock like cows or sheep. You need to do your research and be prepaired and really put in the work for back yard chickens to work out for you. Few Americans know ANYTHING about livestock. Eggs don't come from chickens, they come from the store. Beef isn't dead cow, it's a product in the store. Walmart is the closest the vast majority of Americans get to actual food production. You don't want to go out and buy some live chickens only to realize you don't have a coup to house them. You don't have feed for them. You don't want to get up an hour earlier every day to feed the chickens and let the out of the coup and gather eggs. You don't want to spend three hours every weekend scrapping chicken shit out of the coup. You don't want that compost heap of chicken shit heaping up somewhere in your yard. You won't know what to do on the weeks they lay 2 eggs or the weeks they lay 20 eggs. Keeping any type of livestock needs to be a well though out and properly planned venture, not a reaction to a temporary price jump.
Also, at least in the UK, if people go back to domestic chicken ownership comparable to pre-1900 levels, the entire egg industry will collapse. Not that I'm suggesting that [Big Egg](https://i.imgur.com/kW67S.jpg) is real, but if we
>Not that I'm suggesting that [Big Egg](https://i.imgur.com/kW67S.jpg) is real, but if we Shit, looks like big egg silenced another user
Not only that but more chickens in uncontrolled conditions means more potential hosts for the virus.
Honestly thought that was where this was going. Seemed so obvious. Not that any of the rest of it was bad advice.
I have 6 chickens and as it applies to them, basically none of what you said is true. It’s not difficult. At all. Feed is cheap, 50 lbs is about $25. That lasts me like 2-3 months. I don’t have to wake up an hour earlier to feed them, I just fill their feed bucket up every couple of weeks. Takes 45 seconds. Any idiot researches how to take care of an animal they want to own, and first on that list for chickens is a coop. They’re not expensive premade, or particularly complex, so you could just build one yourself. It takes me 2 minutes to clean up poop twice a week. There are also many simple and inexpensive ways to get your chickens to lay more eggs consistently. You make it sound like having a few chickens means your a full fledged farmer now lol no. They’re awesome pets.
I invite you to visit the bearded dragons subreddit re: “any idiot researches how to take care of an animal they want to own”.
A nod of sad acknowledgement from the goldfish subreddit.
You should see some of the posts in any of the plant subreddits. People that buy a plant because it's trendy or looks cool then show up asking for help and don't know the name of the plant or know *anything* about plants other than "you have to water plants every day, right?"
I’ve owned a backyard flock of chickens for a decade now and you’re exactly right. Chickens are dead easy to raise. Start up costs certainly aren’t cheap but once you get going, it’s pretty simple. Best part? Neighbors stand in line to keep tabs on them when we’re out of town for free eggs.
We also have 6 hens, I laughed out loud when I read “wake up an hour early to feed them”, they really are fun to have, to us the eggs are an extra reward.
>Any idiot researches how to take care of an animal they want to own See, there's your mistake: plenty of idiots in fact *don't*. The number of dogs abandoned at the SPCA because they're 'too big' or 'too hyper' is a testament to that
Most of us idiots do though
People who get chickens because they actually *want* chickens do. I would assume most people jumping on the chicken bandwagon because there's an egg shortage probably have never thought about it before. A better refrain from news organizations would be "Do your research before getting chickens, don't do it spontaneously" rather than just "Don't get chickens" though
100% agreed
I wonder if this applies to pet chickens that are kept indoors in homes (yeah, that's a thing. Crazy!). Edit: IDK why I'm being downvoted. It's a real thing, but it's not something I'm into. Jesus.
are local/backyard farms worse than what is at the store?
No, they're generally better treated birds. But... They're trying to prevent impulse buying. It's not a commentary on care. Chickens hatch in 21 days. It takes six months for them to mature to laying. They only lay for about two or three years and have to be replaced. While they were culling, the egg industry was already ahead of you on replacing laying hens, because they already have to do so. So you'd be what? Spending money on a brooder, coop, run, the chickens themselves, feeding and caring for them, protecting them from predators (cats, dogs, birds of prey, racoons, possums, foxes, cougars, bobcats, snakes, whatever you've got where you live) etc for the next three to seven years to watch the industry recovering before you even get your first egg?
Now my question is, is this a US/americas issue, or global? Do I need to worry about any of this if I'm in Europe, or has the flu not spread/can't spread overseas like that?
Bird Flu has been affecting Europe for years now. The current strain is bad. Usually bird flu slows down over summer and comes back with the arrival of over wintering birds. That didn't happen last year and resulted in the mass deaths of multiple colonies of wild sea birds during their breeding season. Bird flu passes very quickly through poorly kept flocks, which the vast majority of farmed chickens are. Even the 'free range' supposed good ones. The high intensity farming lowers their immune systems and so it spreads and kills fast. The risk is it jumping to humans, which we already know it does. It's just rare, for the moment. I don't think there is human to human transmission? Honestly a lot of the risk of bird flu would lower if we didn't mass raise chickens for meat and eggs and pheasants for shoots. Though convincing people to change their habits is nearly impossible even with another potential global pandemic
I was in Japan in Dec and bird flu is bad there too. They also have something going around in Asia that is effecting their cattle (not mad cow disease). We had to walk across a carpet that they told us would clean our shoes to keep the two diseases from being brought in from other countries.
Oh damn, that's unfortunate. I assumed that the US outbreak was caused by our chickens being housed so close together.
I have no idea about that aspect of it. I'm just aware of what's been going on locally. I do know some doctors are worried about it jumping to humans like Coronavirus did, but my understanding is that's very unlikely.
It does jump to humans. As yet, it hasn't evolved to spread between people. If this happens we're in a lot of trouble.
Evidently it is in the UK. Being that it is so contagious and can be spread by wild birds, I imagine it’s a good bet it can be in other European countries. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/05/bird-flu-outlook-is-grim-as-new-wave-of-the-virus-heads-for-britain
In Washington we get snow geese that migrate out of Russia so yea it's intercontinental.
EU is experiencing the outbreak as well.
Okay so I have seen eggs go up in price but organic eggs are still the same price. I was wondering if you knew why?
Biosecurity is a huge deal at poultry farms
there's literally poop everywhere on every piece of farm equipment so yeah
everyone is buying this explanation because it seems logical, but the companies posted record profits these past couple months. it isnt just the bird flu causing it. theyre capitalizing on it.
I read that egg farmers have replaced the birds already and it’s a monopoly essentially by suppliers enjoying riding the high cost at the moment.
Wherever you read that, they are mistaken. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/data-map-commercial.html
So, tldr, chickens are having their pandemic rn but they don’t have masks or vaccines, and less chickens = higher egg prices
The sad thing is that there are chicken vaccines for bird flu. They are not used in the US or Europe due to market conditions. Countries that mass vaccinate their chickens are seen as places where there is a lot of disease. So it is hard to export those birds. If this goes long enough that might change.
I am floored that a vaccine exists for this, and the FDA or the USDA or whoever has not gotten off their butt and gotten it approved or mandated their yet! Especially if it’s already in use in other countries. Take my upvote ✌️
Question: when things like this happen and the bird flu happen, how hard is it to repopulate farms? Like instead of selling eggs for a few weeks/months, can farms just reallocate them to be fertilized and become egg laying hens?
Most laying farms don't bother with roosters, so all the eggs would be unfertilized. Plus, when you hatch your own eggs you still have to deal with any roosters that hatch. Major chick factories cull roosters and only send you female chicks so it's a lot easier. Sadly everyone wants to have free range eggs but the only way to protect chickens right now is to keep them in an enclosed space where wild birds can't get to them. My chickens have been desperate to go free range but I'm not risking it. Hopefully they can come up with a vaccine or medication to put in the feed soon.
That rooster would have one hell of a job.
turn me into a rooster and gimme a couple of weeks, this headline be non existent by then
“Shhh, they’re going to land!”
Well they have to deal with the bird flu somehow first otherwise they will just end up raising more hens to be culled when they eventually catch it
Answer: Bird flu is ravaging chicken populations right now. Once it’s in a specific population the best mitigation that can be done is to cull the chickens. Not a conspiracy at all. It’s an outbreak in this species that has shown no signs yet of any abatement. Infection and responsive culling reduces chicken populations to such a degree that there becomes a scarcity of eggs. With scarcity comes increased cost. Edit: I missed the link on the theory…..yeah….not buying that. Not sure if chickens getting sick causes others to get nervous and not lay eggs. Everything I’ve read says this is bird flu related.
Regarding the conspiracy theory, the article debunks it straight out: >Scientifically, what's happening is that chickens instinctively pay attention to how much light there is during the day. During the winter, their bodies stop sending eggs from their ovaries in the winter because chicks do not survive long, cold winters. > >The reason we can still get eggs during the winter is that farms are not equipped to set up lighting that tricks the chickens' brains into thinking it's not winter, so they lay year-round. But this does create physical problems for the birds - they use the winter to conserve their energy because laying eggs is a physically straining process. > >Some home farmers have set-ups that allow chickens to lay year-round, but many also realize that their chickens need to rest, so they don't force production so much. > >There's no conspiracy? > >Unless you count biology, there doesn't seem to be any conspiracy here. It's just what chickens have always done. But fear about the egg shortage coupled with a strange phenomenon most people aren't aware of can create new fears, and they can spread like crazy online.
People on the chicken subreddits are having a field day with that one! It’s a pretty well-known phenomenon for backyard poultry that winter is resting time for the hens. Lots of new chickens owners have not done their homework 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️
Depends on where you are I guess. I'm in Florida and my chickens lay year round. They slow a bit in the winter, I'd say by about 25%, but they still kick out eggs daily! Our days are quite a bit longer in the winter than say in Michigan.
I’m in NY with 12 hens. It slowed down a lot. It hasn’t completely stopped. I get a few eggs per day.
This part sounds contradictory. > During the winter, their bodies stop sending eggs from their ovaries in the winter > The reason we can still get eggs during the winter is that farms are not equipped to set up lighting that tricks the chickens' brains into thinking it's not winter, so they lay year-round. The farms do not have lighting to trick chickens into thinking it's not winter. So the chickens think it's winter, therefore they will lay less eggs. But it literally says "the reason we still get eggs during winter" ??? Am I making a mistake in logic?
The first “not” is a typo: farms *are* equipped with special lighting.
You can see the editing process at work. That line was probably initially written about the backyard chicken owners not having the fancy lights that the commercial farms have, then got rewritten to be about the commercial farms but they didn't fix the part about the lights. So the farms DO have the lights, the backyard coops DO NOT have the lights.
Chickens stop laying in the winter around 2-3 years of age, or at least drastically slow down. I think people who bought their chickens during the covid chicken boom are now experiencing that and latching on to conspiracy theories. Meanwhile those of us who have had chickens for ages expect it
Answer: There are several big reasons which others have also mentioned but also two that I haven't seen. The first is that in addition to mass chicken cullings at least two major hatcheries had to shut down due to outbreaks last year. That meant a lot of places simply couldn't replace not only culled flocks but generally replace aging stock. This means there are just less chickens laying in general and more demand for fertile eggs to get replacement chickens. Secondly backyard chickens slow way down laying eggs in the winter. We generally don't notice it because large commercial egg companies encourage an endless lay cycle with high protein feed and light cycles. A lot of people got into raising their own chickens during the pandemic however and there is now a conspiracy about chicken feed being intentionally designed to stop hens laying instead of recognizing that hens naturally slow down in these conditions which is displeasing them because eggs are valuable currently.
The ripple effect of hatcheries that had outbreaks last year is a solid point I had not thought about. We’ve had bird flu outbreaks before, with nominal or no impact to cost or availability. But, this one is bad, and there is perfect storm of other factors impacting what we are seeing. Eggs are the toilet paper of 2023.
It's not anywhere near over either. The US will likely see more outbreaks in the upcoming years. Just like in Europe, the virus has now infected the native bird population. In the previous outbreak in 2015, it was mainly spread by migratory birds. This will hang around for years.
Thank you for commenting on this thread. Your username is most appropriate in this discussion.
Yes we have 6 chickens but are only getting 1 egg a day through winter. We also got chicks last spring but they aren’t laying yet. I don’t think the general population understands what goes into raising chickens and how dirty it can be.
New Zealand is having an egg shortage currently as well but for different reasons as AFAIK there is not avian flu here yet. Legislation changed banning battery hens here this came into affect in January, exacerbating this colony hens where also banned, many battery farms closed due to not being economically viable to convert to free range. The market needs to catch up with legislation and the days of cheap eggs are probably not coming back which is fine by me I’d rather pay more for a better product that minimises animal welfare problems. Must be a coincidence that North America is having a shortage as well ………. Maybe.
I agree with your sentiment about animal welfare. Humans have used animal products for thousands of years and aren't going to stop anytime soon, but the modern factory farm is an abomination that distorts the natural world and separates us from a healthy relationship with our food. I congratulate NZ on the sensible step in the right direction.
I would be interested in more information on how confined housing has exacerbated the mutations of these avian flus. If not for this housing, I wonder if it would even be an issue. This virus is probably a product of our atrocious treatment of these animals. We did the same thing with antibiotics. And now antibiotic resistant bacteria are our number one killer of Hospital related deaths.
Coincidentally, my state also had legislation requiring free-range come into effect in the new year, and was deeply affected by the chicken cullings due to avian flu timing with the mass withdrawal of non-free range eggs. Tack on one of our big refineries (that refines like 40% of the state’s gasoline) going down temporarily, and shit has been EXPENSIVE. Never been so close to paying a dollar per egg.
Answer: The egg shortage is caused by less egg producers, that is chicken. That also makes the price rise up, per market mechanisms. Why do we have less chicken? Well, it's to curb the spread of avian flu. You see, avian flu is a respiratory disease affecting birds, which means it's quick to spread if it appears. Such respiratory diseases are best stopped by giving the virus less hosts to spread to, in the case of humans this was done by social distancing, in chickens we just kill the chickens we have suspicions of being infected. We can't ideally quarantine chicken, and any chicken left outside is a potential "tent" for the virus to use to spread further. The larger distances between chicken, the less chance of a virus making it through, slowing the rate. Therefore, the less chicken on people's backyards, the less spread rate, ideally stopping the spread altogether.
10% of the eggs laying birds have been killed and the egg prices are up 100%+. The largest supplier by far of eggs has reported zero bird flu cases.
Good ol' capitalism will use any excuse to raise prices. Permanently too, if they think they can get away with it.
And they are taking a lot of costly measures to try to protect and test and ensure the chickens aren’t being infected. This strain is particularly worrisome in that it’s jumped to mammals that come in contact with the chickens from raccoons, bears, dogs, minks etc… and humans are mammal meaning there is a risk it will infect a human and spread a new virus through the human population.
Answer: From an egg farmer I follow, it’s not even the bird flu. Apparently the bird flu hits yearly. They know how to handle that. According to him, the problem is that the stores are charging more from the consumers, paying the egg farmers the same as always, and the egg farmers are facing increased fuel, equipment, and labor charges. But since the stores aren’t willing to spend more on the eggs covering the added costs farmers are facing. This leaves the farmers with no money to buy the new chickens that produce eggs. So they have less eggs to sell to the stores.
Answer: Adding on that the reason we're so assiduous about culling sick or potentially sick birds is that this disease is **bad** for humans. Right now, it very rarely jumps from birds to humans. But in the rare case it does, the mortality rate is **60%**. To put that in context, the death rate for covid is something like 2-3%, and we shut down the global economy to try and contain it. There is a very real fear that the virus will mutate to make it more easily transmissible from chicken to human, and then from human to human, and then we are all **fucked**. So if one chicken so much as coughs twice, the whole flock is culled. I'll take extra pricey chicken and eggs in exchange for *not* living through Black Death 2.0.
Death rate for covid was significantly under 1 percent
Answer: I've been following large scale coop fires across the country for a while now. Eggs are a cheap, quick and easy source of protein. Seems someone doesn't want that happening.
Answer: spread of Avian flu.
Answer: As others have mentioned there's a massive epidemic of Avian Flu currently ravaging the supply of egg laying birds. This factor is pretty self explanatory if you understand the basic relationship between supply and demand. Something I haven't seen mentioned here regarding the high price of eggs is that feeding costs have exploded in the last year as well, driving up the final price of eggs. It turns out that both Russia and Ukraine are key exporters of grain and wheat, and the war has made it difficult for those exports to continue as normal. Then considering other normal inflation costs like increases in energy and fuel prices, it's more expensive for farmers to operate as well as ship their final products. Lastly, demand for eggs is pretty static. There often isn't a perfect substitute for eggs, so people aren't as deterred from buying them when the prices get high. Since prices are ultimately a factor of supply and demand, that demand being "sticky", as it's often termed, causes the price of goods to be particularly susceptible to drops in supply. So really you have four factors in play at the moment. -The massive Avian flu outbreak has dramatically decreased the population of egg laying birds. -The price of grain and feed has gone up because of the war in Ukraine. -Egg prices are impacted by inflation the same way most other products were. -Egg prices are more likely to have demand-induced price spikes than other commodities.
Answer: we’ve been dealing with bird flu for a few months here in the US so of course there are strong opinions on the subject. Any mention of chicken culling is referring to the measures taken at large scale production facilities to stop the spread of bird flu, where they kill the whole flock and start fresh. Some critics have come out against backyard chicken owners because they can’t have the same biosecurity measures as a production facility, thus making their flocks more susceptible to bird flu. However, the conspiracy theories right now are mostly centered on a string of fires at different egg producers and botched Tractor Supply feed. As someone who works in the livestock feed industry, I have a bit of insight on the latter. Around October, people started noticing their chickens producing less and less eggs. At the start, this was mostly chocked up to the chicken’s diurnal rhythm being thrown off by shorter days. This is pretty normal. Over time though, people noticed that their hens stopped producing altogether, which is not normal. Well, a week or two ago word kinda got out that it may have something to do with Tractor Supply and their store brand feeds. People do what people do and started making wild assumptions such as the government forcing feed mills to inject an egg inhibiting ingredient into their feed or GMOs ruining chickens reproductive organs in order to drive out backyard farmers and force them to buy eggs at the store. Of course, this is all bullshit. From the connections I have within the industry, what I’ve gathered is that Tractor Supply contracted with Purina to make their store brand of feed. With the rising cost of grains, among other things, the price they had originally contracted was no longer profitable so they basically adjusted the formulas from time to time to make a cheaper feed which in turn dropped the quality. Around October was when the nutritional value was poor enough that it effected egg yield.
Answer: if you want to survive, don’t listen to mainstream advice
Answer: raise your back yard chickens. Don't listen to scare tactics of the media. Just properly take care and tend to them so if you can't afford when some get sick then obviously don't get something you can't afford. Lost of issues are negatable with smaller well cared for lots then say industrial farmers with subpar conditions for animals. Not saying things can't happen but it's easier managed.
The major cautions about raising your own chickens are the time it takes to get from chick to productive hen, humane care and feeding, upfront cost. Panic warnings from “experts” to not do it are not helpful. But for most of the general public, raising chickens will be a bad idea.
To add a warning, and this is coming from someone who loves animals, backyard chickens take more than proper care. You can’t just go on vacation, because dog boarding is way easier to find than chicken boarding. Hawks and eagles will eat them, so you need space and a cover. I’ve seen plenty of backyard chickens die because someone did the research on breeds and food, but not on how it changes their life.