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poorbill OP t1_j3xu9cm wrote

Reply to comment by byfpe in Why do poultry producers kill their stock when they get bird flu, rather than keeping survivors to reproduce? by poorbill

I kind of get that, but what hope do we have of ever breeding chickens which are no as susceptible to bird flu if we just kill them all? Surely, some would survive that have greater immunity. At this point it seems almost inevitable that most farms are going to be hit.

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byfpe t1_j3xvqf5 wrote

I imagine there are research farms for which immunity is a business and they are interested in “breeding” survivors. But for a commercial farm this wouldnt make economical sense.

In any case all these virus are like the human flu, you can catch them year after year because they mutate.

As someone else posted. Also note that many of these farms dont run the whole business cycle from egg to fully grown chicken. Some farms will be breeders, some will buy the small chicken and are just interested in growing it.

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JennaSais t1_j3y4vkw wrote

Unfortunately, this Highly Pathenogenic Avian Influenza has a 90%-100% mortality rate among infected poultry. From that kind of loss, the odds of you getting birds that will be breeding quality in sufficient numbers to be able to replicate the resistant traits well would not be worth the risk of it jumping species.

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BloodshotPizzaBox t1_j3y40cp wrote

Selective breeding doesn't seem like a great strategy here in the first place, as viruses probably have a vastly shorter generation time (and hence a faster adaptation rate) than chickens.

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peekdasneaks t1_j3ysk20 wrote

Its less about the genetics and far more about the conditions. If humans were literally stuffed into cages with other humans and not allowed room to move, then all those cages were packed together into warehouses, we would have similar health issues.

Just check out what happened on the slave ships for example. Its terrible what we put other living beings through.

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JennaSais t1_j3z3b83 wrote

I agree that those things suck, but this virus also affects small and free-range producers, as well as wild birds (though not always with as high a mortality rate), so it's not the conditions that lead to the 90-100% mortality rate.

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Planetary_Epitaph t1_j3zayuu wrote

I think you might be half missing the point - the conditions are practically the best case scenario for engendering the creation of extraordinarily virulent diseases, and with such a huge population to infect nearby, high lethality doesn’t have the reproductive evolutionary disadvantages it normally does where the host needs to survive long enough to transmit.

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JennaSais t1_j3zcef4 wrote

No, I get that, but I'm saying that unfortunately for this one that horse has already left the barn, so to speak, so if the system changed tomorrow it would be just as bad as far as this virus is concerned. The same mortality rate would apply to those newly-freed chickens. And since it infects other species of fowl (ducks, for example) with less lethality it actually has all the advantages of a lower mortality rate while still being able to infect and be more lethal to chickens, whatever their living situation.

I absolutely believe we need to stop keeping animals of all kinds in conditions like that, to be clear, for this and many other reasons. That's why I got chickens of my own.

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krashlia t1_j40u4oz wrote

Its like the coronavirus, when the pandemic started. Each and everytime someone reported that "a case" appeared, I was certain that there were actually 10 more than that. Once a virus shows up in a population, you'll only notice some people showing symptoms within a certain amount of time, while others simply haven't displayed signs of infection yet.

At some point, Containment of the disease can only go so far, unless you're willing to use ever more force to keep people in place (since they'll characteristically refuse to do what they're told), or just straight-up kill them to save the rest of the population.

But, people aren't chickens.

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know-your-onions t1_j42lghr wrote

Humans haven’t managed to develop immunity to flu viruses yet (and we don’t kill all the humans that get infected - in fact we go out of our way to keep them alive), so what makes you think birds would be different?

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SolarDor t1_j3yjk8x wrote

Bird flu isn’t a one and done illness. Ask an immunologist for a clear answer.

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