What if the animals are in charge?

On Saturday, April 16, 2022, the government started culling around 200,000 chickens in a radius of one kilometer around the contaminated company. At seven poultry farmers, the laying hens had to be killed as a precaution.

The culling of 200,000 chickens in Barneveld raises the question of how we will later look back on the era of intensive livestock farming. Tidy sounds like tidy, but tidy you can't call it. The animals are gassed. And then disposed of and destroyed. Although you can also put the figures into perspective: in Dutch intensive livestock farming, more than 13 million animals are hunted through each day. Chickens, calves and pigs that don't see outside air throughout their lives.

It raises the time-honored question: how does man relate to other life on earth? Are animals production units, or do they have a value of themselves? Does nature have a right to exist, or should it primarily provide natural resources for humans? When you read about world history, it's always about people. If there are animals in it, it is because they are milked, slaughtered, ridden, or because they are a danger. In the latter case, they are 'wild'. That's blowout. But who is actually the threat here? Man or Animal?

Risks of bird flu for humans increase. In addition to birds, mammals such as seals, foxes and martens are now dying from the new avian flu variant. And the risk for people is also increasing. All poultry must be vaccinated. “Public health must be prioritized”

“The risk we are”. “The risk is not the animals,” emphasizes the professor of the University of Wageningen. “They have been going about their business for hundreds of thousands of years and thus host all kinds of viruses. The risk is we. Any change we make to the way animals live can cause a virus to jump to humans”