Flu-Driven Mass Slaughter of Midwest Poultry Conveys the Scale of Our Meat Habit →

Here’s a brief look behind headlines from the Midwest about the scope of the poultry slaughter necessitated by the spread, since last December, of the H5N2 strain of bird flu.

You can keep track of the impact on chicken and turkey farms at an avian influenza web page maintained by the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. (The Poultry Site, an industry news site, is also tracking the latest developments.)

The combined toll in chickens and turkeys is approaching 50 million dead or slaughtered birds.

That is a huge number. But gauge it against the scale of the mass-meat industry and it becomes more like a rounding error. Just one company, Tyson Foods (one of the biggest chicken vendors on the planet) processes 41,000,000 chickens a week.