The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Editorial

DENA M. JONES
SPECIAL TO THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE

The current outbreak of exotic Newcastle disease in Southern California chickens has already cost farmers more than 1 million birds. Projections that the final toll could be much higher are causing alarm within the egg industry; yet it is the practices of the industry itself that have helped put it at risk from the disease in the first place.

Newcastle disease is a highly contagious and fatal viral disease with a death rate of nearly 100 percent of infected flocks. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Newcastle has not infected a commercial chicken operation in the U.S. since an outbreak occurred in southern California in 1971. That time it took three years and $56 million before the outbreak was contained.

The USDA acknowledges that Newcastle disease spreads rapidly among animals kept in confinement. And no animal is more intensively confined than the egg-laying hen. To minimize labor costs, modern egg "factories" cram 6 or 7 chickens into a small wire cage measuring 18 by 20 inches, in which the birds are unable to flap their wings or even lie down.

On a modern egg factory farm, more than 150,000 hens may be kept inside one warehouse-like building. Conditions within the crowded buildings produce an ideal environment for the transmission of contagious diseases like Newcastle. Euthanasia of an infected flock of more than 1 million birds, as government officials have ordered in this case, is very difficult to accomplish in a humane manner.

Animal confinement is the engine driving the consolidation of American agriculture. In the past two decades, thousands of family farms have been put out of business by the cost-cutting measures of large multi-national corporations. Last summer, in announcing plans to erect a single building to hold 2.4 million birds, the owner of one of the nation's largest egg-producing companies noted, "We used to have one "worker" for 10,000 chickens. Now we have one for every 150,000."

As late as the 1940s, small backyard flocks of 100 chickens or less made up a majority of the egg industry in the U.S. Today, the University of California estimates that 98 percent of eggs sold in the U.S. come from hens that live their short lives jammed into small cages stacked to the ceiling of ammonia and dust-filled sheds.

Industrialized agriculture has kept down the price of a dozen eggs, but the true cost to the American consumer includes the loss of family farms, the threat of disease outbreaks, and extreme animal suffering.