A Meat and Dairy Article from All-Creatures.org

Pitman Family Farms Received $20 million in bailouts after killing 300,000 birds en masse via heatstroke in response to avian flu, HPAI

From Dr. Crystal Heath, OurHonor.org
March 2024

With bailout money in hand, Pitman plans to expand in Lemoore and add 16 new poultry barns and would include an additional 485,000 chickens, for a new total of approximately 550,000 chickens.... Poultry companies have received over $715 million in bailouts, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

Op ed as originally published on The Fresno Bee.

“As highly pathogenic avian influenza has decimated flocks across the country, with nearly 82 million birds killed since the beginning of the outbreak in 2022, poultry companies have received over $715 million in bailouts, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

Recent work out of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows such influenza outbreaks could even mutate, jump to human beings, and cause the next pandemic. The virus has now made the jump to infect mammals, killing 96% of elephant seal pups born in 2023 in Argentina’s Península Valdés. But we keep incentivizing these high-risk practices. Pitman Family Farms received more than $20 million in bailoutsat taxpayer expense.

Worse still, after failing to put plans in place to end the lives of their birds humanely, more than 300,000 of Pitman’s birds were killed by sealing up barns, pumping in heat, until the animals inside died via heatstroke in a method known as ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+).

With bailout money in hand, Pitman plans to expand in Lemoore and add “16 new poultry barns and would include an additional 485,000 chickens, for a new total of approximately 550,000 chickens.

What if we aligned our technology and tax dollars with our empathy instead? Researchers say that investing in food production methods that don’t require slaughtering animals would save us $7.3 trillion globally in health burdens and ecosystem degradation.”

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