Following an April 21 vote from the N.C. Rules Review Commission, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission might not be allowed to implement anew ruleallowing bear hunting in three Western North Carolina sanctuary areas that are currently off-limits to the practice.
The Rules Review Commission received a barrage of letters requesting legislative review of the rule, with thepacketcollating those letters totaling 439 pages.State lawrequires legislative review for rules that receive 10 or more letters requesting it.
Rules sent for legislative review have delayed implementation dates and could be struck down completely. According to state statute, the clock will start ticking when the N.C. General Assembly convenes for its short session on May 4. Legislators will have 31 days from the session’s start to file a bill specifically disapproving the rule. If such a bill is filed…
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COLUMBUS, Ohio —
Hunters with disabilities recently had the opportunity to participate in special hunts where they got to enjoy the outdoors and hunt for wild turkey.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources hosted the two hunts that took place at Pike State Forest and Blue Rock State Forest. The hunters came from various parts of Ohio and several were disabled veterans.
Twenty-three hunters participated in the 15th annual Wheelin’ Sportsmen hunt for wild turkey at Blue Rock State Forest. More than 50 guides were at the hunt assisting the 23 hunters. Wildlife officials say three turkeys were harvested during the event.
Fourteen hunters participated in the Thunder in the Hills wild turkey hunt at Pike State Forest. Around 50 organizations helped with donations and provided volunteers at the hunt. Two turkeys were harvested during the event.
“Forest management ensures natural tree regeneration and diverse habitat, and wild turkeys are among the many forest wildlife species that have certainly benefited,” said Dan Balser, chief of the Division of Forestry. “We are fortunate to be able to share these hunting opportunities with a great group of hunters and the many partners who make these weekends special for us all.”
The final month of Minnesota Timberwolves basketball was livelier than ever this season, and not just because they nearly upset the Memphis Grizzlies in their first-round playoff series.
During one game in mid-April, a woman glued her hand to the court. A few days later, another woman chained herself to the goal post. The following week, a third woman, dressed as a referee, stormed the court before removing her jacket, exposing a shirt underneath that read “Glen Taylor roasts animals alive.”
The protests, coordinated by the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, were aimed at the Timberwolves’ majority owner Glen Taylor. Taylor also owns Rembrandt Enterprises, a large Iowa egg producer that has culled — meaning deliberately killed — 5.3 million of its hens in response to a widespread bird flu outbreak (and then laid off nearly all of its staff).
Alicia Santurio disrupted a Minnesota Timberwolves basketball game in April, protesting the team’s owner, Glen Taylor, who also owns an Iowa egg farm that culled 5.3 million chickens in response to a bird flu outbreak.
While the virus has a near 100 percent mortality rate among infected poultry — and can spread rapidly among birds, especially in packed industrial farming conditions — it’s currently believed to pose little threat to human beings. It only rarely spills over to people, and only to those who come into close contact with infected birds. Even when there are human infections, “the viruses are unable to efficiently transmit between humans,” notes Michelle Wille, a virus ecologist at the University of Sydney.
But when certain strains of avian flu do manage to infect humans, it can be deadly. From 2003 to 2021, a little more than half of the 863 people who contracted an earlier strain of H5N1 died. The H5N1 strain currently spreading appears to be less transmissible and less severe to humans than those that infected people in the past, and only two people have tested positive for the strain — a man in the United Kingdom last December, and a man in Colorado last week.
The Colorado man — a prison inmate who had come in direct contact with presumably infected birds while working at a culling operation as part of a pre-release workprogram — experienced a few days of fatigue and recovered after being treated with an antiviral drug. Around 10 people who came into contact with him are under close observation.
Beyond the occasional one-off case in close human contacts, the bigger worry is that an unchecked flu that spreads among birds has plenty of opportunities to mutate in a way that allows it to transmit efficiently from person to person, thereby kicking off a new influenza pandemic. A widespread bird flu outbreak in 2005 raised alarm bells and prompted the US Senate to allocate $4 billion to prepare for a possible influenza pandemic — though when a new flu pandemic did break out in 2009, the origin was ultimately found in a swine virus.
So far, the bird flu has mostly been a problem for birds. It’s not the disease that’s killing most of them, however — it’s their owners.
When chicken, turkey, and egg companies detect one infected bird, they kill the whole flock in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. And they’re doing so using a variety of excruciating methods, including spraying birds with a suffocating water-based foam or closing off barn vents to raise temperatures so the birds die by heat stroke, a practice called ventilation shutdown, which can take 1.5 to 3.75 hours to kill them.
“It’s horrendous,” says Craig Watts, a former large-scale chicken farmer and currently a director of field operations for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, a nonprofit that advocates against industrial livestock operations. “I’ve been in those houses when the power went out and the generator didn’t kick on. In just a few minutes [the heat] is unbearable. … I can’t imagine that going on for hours and hours.”
According to the Storm Lake Times, a newspaper based near Rembrandt’s operation, the companyused ventilation shutdown plus, or VSD+, meaning they also pumped heat into their barns to kill the birds faster, a practice being employed in several states.Rembrandt Enterprises did not respond to a request for comment.
The situation is horrific, but given the industrialized nature of the US poultry industry and its response to past bird flu outbreaks, animal advocates say it’s unsurprising. Nearly all birds raised for meat and eggs in the US are raised on factory farms, where producers raise hundreds of thousands to millions of animals per year. And most of these animals are genetically identical, which could make them more vulnerable to bird flu. Some experts say the intensification of animal farming — raising more animals closer together — could also be increasing the virulence and transmission rate of bird flu strains.
Dena Jones of the Animal Welfare Institute says the 2014-2015 bird flu outbreak in the US, which led to the culling of more than 50 million animals — the largest cull in US history — didn’t prompt any real change in the industry.Instead, mega operations that raise millions of birds per year are continuing to be built across the country, from Oregon to Wisconsin and West Virginia to North Carolina as US chicken and egg consumption rises.
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“We’re doubling down on this same system by raising more animals with less genetic diversity and higher density in larger operations, and all of that contributes to making it difficult to humanely kill an animal during an emergency,” Jones said.
There are culling methods that kill the birds much quicker than ventilation shutdown, such as spraying them with nitrogen-filled foam or gassing them in small enclosures, a method some producers are using to address this outbreak. There’s also a race to create an effective bird flu vaccine that could be used to slow the spread of future outbreaks, a race the USDA is partially funding.
Considering the speed at which bird flu spreads among commercial poultry flocks, and how painful it is for infected birds, the industry has no choice but to mass cull. But the USDA’s approval of ventilation shutdown in 2015 and the rise of its use in recent years, combined with the slow pace of vaccine approval and adoption, mean that for the time being, the birds themselves will continue to receive little consideration in the fight against bird flu. The ongoing expansion and intensification of US animal agriculture, along with a rise in animal disease outbreaks, might also mean that we need to learn how to live with the bird flu and the looming threat it poses.
Bird flu spread, explained
Migratory waterfowl, like ducks, geese, and terns, are the natural hosts of highly pathogenic avian influenza strains, but can largely — though not always — carry and spread the virus without showing symptoms.
Wild birds rarely come into direct contact with farmed chickens and turkeys, most of which are raised in large indoor barns — especially in more developed economies — but instead spread the virus when their fecal droppings, saliva, or nasal secretions contaminate animal feed or land on surfaces like farmworkers’ clothing or farm equipment. Researchers say the global poultry trade also contributes to the worldwide spread of the bird flu through the import and export of infected poultry.
Once any birds test positive for the virus, the whole flock is culled, as the flu can quickly spread to the tens of thousands of other hens, chickens, or turkeys in a single farm. And the flu itself is agonizing for infected poultry. Chickens have trouble breathing and suffer from extreme diarrhea, and sometimes develop swelling around their head, neck, or eyes. Turkeys’ wings can become paralyzed and they might experience tremors.
A turkey farm in Illinois in 2019. Over the last few months, millions of chickens and turkeys have been culled — primarily at large-scale farms — to slow the spread of the bird flu.
Bird flu outbreaks have been recorded in commercial poultry flocks since at least the 19th century, but the frequency accelerated — and became a bigger issue in the poultry industry — starting in 1997, when an outbreak of H5N1 in Hong Kong chicken farms led to 18 infections in people, six of whom died. Officials responded by culling all 1.3 million chickens in Hong Kong in the winter of 1997-98. Since then, outbreaks have occurred around the world every few years.
And not much beyond mass culling can be done to slow the spread once it starts. Adel Talaat, a professor of microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says we should improve disease surveillance and farm biosecurity to help prevent new outbreaks and slow the spread, but a vaccine that could reliably reduce transmission would go a long way.
At the moment, there aren’t any highlyeffective vaccines on the market, but Talaat is working to develop one using a database of thousands of avian influenza antigens to create a “composite” vaccine that he hopes will protect against current and future virus strains. “Our job is to try to stop this cycle of transmission,” Talaat says. “Because if you stop the cycle of transmission you will be able to basically stop the mutation and stop the replication of the virus.”
Adel Talaat, a professor of microbiology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, is developing a bird flu vaccine he hopes can be used to slow the spread of future bird flu outbreaks.
He estimates it could take up to five years until he completes his work and hopefully receives USDA approval, and says a mass vaccination program in the early phase of a bird flu outbreak could be effective at slowing the spread of the virus.
“In a big country [like the US], once we start seeing any one case, we know it’s going to go throughout the states — state by state — so we really should start an aggressive campaign for vaccination right away,” Talaat says.
Aside from the ineffectiveness of currently available bird flu vaccines, they’re also made in such a way that it’s impossible to distinguish vaccinated, non-infected birds from infected birds. And because no country wants to import meat from potentially infected birds, the vaccines have been a non-starter. Talaat hopes his vaccine will solve this long-standing problem.
A spokesperson with the National Turkey Federation told Vox over email that the trade group “supports vaccine development and believes it can be done relatively quickly. However, World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) rules impose severe trade penalties for vaccine use, and we are encouraging USDA to work aggressively for a change in those rules.”
“Decisions on vaccinations require many data and we’re investigating an avian influenza vaccine that could distinguish from the wild-type virus,” Rick Coker, a USDA spokesperson, said over email. “We do not have a time frame on any potential vaccine or how it would be used.”
There are also efforts underway to create a gene-edited chicken breed immune to bird flu. But for now, the primary way to prevent the flu from killing poultry is by killing poultry.
Toward less cruel culling methods
During the 2014-2015 bird flu outbreak, the most common culling method in the US entailed spraying turkeys with suffocating water-based foam; with this method, it takes seven to 15 minutes for the birds to die, and it causes significant pain. The second-most common method was gassing hens with carbon dioxide in small enclosures, which can render birds unconscious within 30 seconds.
But according to the USDA, deploying these methods was sometimes too slow to meet the need of depopulating infected flocks within 24 hours. So, at the end of 2015, fearing another wave of outbreaks, the USDA approved ventilation shutdown — closing off air vents so the temperature rises, which can take hours for the birds to die by heat stroke. The USDA now says ventilation shutdown alone, without added heat or CO2, should only be used as a last-resort measure.
Over email, Coker with the USDA told Vox that ventilation shutdown plus should only be used under “constrained circumstances,” like when depopulation by water-based foam or CO2 gassing is not possible. Various factors, like epidemiological information and housing and environmental conditions are weighed by USDA personnel, farm operators, and state officials when deciding whether or not to use VSD+. “Should VSD+ be authorized on-site, responders will carry it out quickly and as humanely as possible,” he said.
Despite the policy to only use it under constrained circumstances, VSD+ has already been employed in at least six states and on millions of birds during this current outbreak.
Will Lowrey, an attorney with the animal rights group Animal Outlook who has submitted public records requests on VSD+, found that in addition to being used on the 5.3 million Rembrandt hens, it has also been used on commercial poultry farms in Kentucky, Delaware, Minnesota (Jennie-O/Hormel), Missouri (Tyson Foods), and Wisconsin.
Producers do have some incentive to use VSD+ over other culling options. To receive reimbursement for costs incurred during depopulation and disposal, they have to use a culling method permitted by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), a nongovernmental trade group, and VSD+ generallyrequires less labor and supplies than most other methods.But it’s an inhumane practice.
In the AVMA’s culling guidelines for VSD+, the organization cites research conducted at North Carolina State University in 2016 meant to replicate and study ventilation shutdown. Researchers placed one chicken at a time in a small enclosure and pumped in heat, carbon dioxide, or both. Animal Outlook obtained footage from that experiment via a Freedom of Information Act request and shared it with Marina Bolotnikova for the Intercept. You can view the experiment below (warning: it’s graphic).
In the video, a bird appears to be gasping for air, unable to stand, and according to a veterinarian interviewed by the Intercept, showing signs of attempting to vocalize (the video has no audio). It took around 91 minutes for the birds to die of just ventilation shutdown, 53 minutes when heat was added, 11.5 minutes when carbon dioxide was added, and nine minutes when both heat and carbon dioxide were added. Other research has found that times are much longer for hens in stacked cage systems, as opposed to turkeys and chickens raised for meat who live on barn floors.
A coalition ofmore than1,500 veterinarians, appropriately called Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shutdown, say the process isinhumane and are calling on the American Veterinary Medical Association to classify it as “not recommended” for culling. An investigator with Direct Action Everywhere — the group that’s been disrupting Minnesota Timberwolves games — says they entered a Rembrandt facility after depopulation and allegedly found some birds who had survived ventilation shutdown plus.
“On the floor and in the cages we found … upwards of 100 chickens [still alive],” the investigator, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, said. “If you [extrapolate that for] the parts of the facility we didn’t go into, maybe several hundred chickens were still stuck in cages or running around loose.”
Jones says more humane methods need to be prioritized, like nitrogen-filled foam and small-enclosure gassing, which knock animals unconscious before they die.
Despite the challenges that come with these methods — increased costs and labor, among others — Watts, the ex-chicken farmer, says change would be a matter of the industry prioritizing animal welfare.
“I hear the industry argument about everything costing too much,” he said. “If they’re serious about animal welfare, you and I [wouldn’t be] having this discussion on what could be done better — they would already be doing it.” He wants to see the industrialized model that dominates US agriculture today — the model he once raised birds in — replaced by farms with smaller flock sizes, and where birds are given outdoor access and more space.
Factory-farming animals is an inherently risky business. And when a system that crams tens of thousands of birds together is faced with a highly-transmissible, lethal virus, that system is largely defenseless. At best, industry can work to minimize harm, but only if it’s willing to pay increased costs. But the conditions on today’s meat and egg farms — and the approval and adoption of ventilation shutdown — demonstrate a drive toward efficiency, not welfare.
“In the short term, it would be my preference to see something more painless and quick” used to cull the birds, says Watts. “In the long term, what we’re looking at is a very flawed system — it’s time to just basically push it off a ledge and reboot and start over.”
Food prices in the U.S. are rising, but sticker shock at the grocery store is especially acute in the egg and poultry aisles, as a highly contagious avian flu decimates commercial poultry flocks across the U.S.
Highly pathogenicavian influenza, or bird flu, is spreading across the U.S., forcing farmers to destroy nearly 280 commercial and backyard flocks in32 statessince January.
“More than 28 million laying hens have been culled as a result of the bird flu — that’s…
Bird flu has been making headlines for months. Since February, it has killed 36.6 million birds in the U.S., some of whom were put to death to keep the infection from spreading, according to theUSDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). The good news is that bird flu rarely infects humans, and so far, only two human cases have been reported.
The first human infection occurred in late 2021 in the United Kingdom, and it did not spread to anyone else. The most recent case popped up at the end of April in Colorado, and it also seems to be an isolated infection. Both people who contracted this strain of bird flu were working closely with birds, according to theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC).
“We took this one from the river,” Kevin Brotz said about a 12-footer from a past hunt.
Brotz is an alligator hunter who also guides others trying to land one. He’s not sure how many people will hunt midday now that it’s OK to do so for permitted hunters during the season.
“An hour or two here or there would have been maybe a better option because that middle of the day…
The plaintiffs argue the ban violates the new “right to food” added to the state constitution by referendum last November.
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But Tom Doak, executive director ofMaine Woodland Owners, said in an interview his members just want one day to themselves after opening their land at no cost six days a week to hunters, hikers, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles.
“That’s an extraordinary benefit that very few places have, and in return, the landowners have been kind of granted this idea that…
A Jamesport man is in custody on Grundy County charges of felony unlawful use of a weapon after shooting at a person.
Bond for 22-year-old Allen Detweiler is $25,000 cash or 10% surety. He’s held at the Grundy County Law Enforcement Center pending an appearance in court.
According to the Grundy County Sheriff’s Department, Detweiler and his brother were turkey hunting in southwest Grundy County on Saturday when the tom turkey they were seeking ended up on another individual’s property. Detweiler and the brother then trespassed onto the adjoining property where they subsequently shot and killed the turkey.
The Department of Justice announced Thursday that a superyacht owned by Suleiman Kerimov, a Russian oligarch, has been seized off the coast of Fiji. According to the DOJ, the Amadea, valued at $300 million, was subject to seizure because Kerimov allegedly broke U.S. law to fund and maintain the boat, including laundering U.S. dollars. The 348-foot luxury vessel was detained through the Task Force KleptoCapture, an initiative created in response to the war in Ukraine to hold Russian oligarchs who have benefited from the Russian regime accountable. The FBI worked in coordination with Fijian authorities to close in on the boat. “This seizure of Suleiman Kerimov’s vessel, the Amadea, nearly 8,000 miles from Washington, D.C., symbolizes the reach of the Department of Justice as we continue to work with our global partners to disrupt the sense of…
Paleolithic cuisine was anything but lean and green, according to a 2021 study on the diets of our Pleistocene ancestors. For a good 2 million years, Homo sapiens and their ancestors ditched the salad and dined heavily on meat, putting them at the top of the food chain.
It’s not quite the balanced diet of berries, grains, and steak we might picture when we think of ‘paleo’ food. But according to anthropologists from Israel’s Tel Aviv University and the University of Minho in Portugal, modern hunter-gatherers have given us the wrong impression of what we once ate.
“This comparison is futile, however, because 2 million years ago hunter-gatherer societies could hunt and consume elephants and other large animals – while today’s hunter gatherers do not have access to such bounty,” said Miki Ben‐Dor from Israel’s Tel Aviv University in April last year.
A look through hundreds of previous studies on everything from modern human anatomy and physiology to measures of the isotopes inside ancient human bones and teeth suggests we were primarily apex predators until roughly 12,000 years ago.
Reconstructing the grocery list of hominids who lived as far back as 2.5 million years ago is made all that much more difficult by the fact plant remains don’t preserve as easily as animal bones, teeth, and shells.
Other studies have used chemical analysis of bones and tooth enamel to find localized examples of diets heavy in plant material. But extrapolating this to humanity as a whole isn’t so straight-forward.
We can find ample evidence of game-hunting in the fossil record, but to determine what we gathered, anthropologists have traditionally turned to modern-day ethnography based on the assumption that little has changed.
According to Ben-Dor and his colleagues, this is a huge mistake.
“The entire ecosystem has changed, and conditions cannot be compared,” said Ben‐Dor.
Above: Graph showing where Homo sapiens sat on the spectrum of carnivore to herbivore during the Pleistocene and Upper Pleistocene (UP).
Dominated by the last great ice age, most of what is today Europe and North America was regularly buried under thick glaciers.
With so much water locked up as ice, ecosystems around the world were vastly different to what we see today. Large beasts roamed the landscape, including mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths – in far greater numbers than we see today.
Of course it’s no secret that Homo sapiens used their ingenuity and uncanny endurance to hunt down these massive meal-tickets. But the frequency with which they preyed on these herbivores hasn’t been so easy to figure out.
Rather than rely solely on the fossil record, or make tenuous comparisons with pre-agricultural cultures, the researchers turned to the evidence embedded in our own bodies and compared it with our closest cousins.
“We decided to use other methods to reconstruct the diet of stone-age humans: to examine the memory preserved in our own bodies, our metabolism, genetics and physical build,” said Ben‐Dor.
“Human behavior changes rapidly, but evolution is slow. The body remembers.”
For example, compared with other primates, our bodies need more energy per unit of body mass. Especially when it comes to our energy-hungry brains. Our social time, such as when it comes to raising children, also limits the amount of time we can spend looking for food.
We have higher fat reserves, and can make use of them by rapidly turning fats into ketones when the need arises. Unlike other omnivores, where fat cells are few but large, ours are small and numerous, echoing those of a predator.
Our digestive systems are also suspiciously like that of animals higher up the food chain. Having unusually strong stomach acid is just the thing we might need for breaking down proteins and killing harmful bacteria you’d expect to find on a week-old mammoth chop.
Even our genomes point to a heavier reliance on a meat-rich diet than a sugar-rich one.
“For example, geneticists have concluded that areas of the human genome were closed off to enable a fat-rich diet, while in chimpanzees, areas of the genome were opened to enable a sugar-rich diet,” said Ben‐Dor.
The team’s argument is extensive, touching upon evidence in tool use, signs of trace elements and nitrogen isotopes in Paleolithic remains, and dental wear.
It all tells a story where our genus’ trophic level – Homo’s position in the food web – became highly carnivorous for us and our cousins, Homo erectus, roughly 2.5 million years ago, and remained that way until the upper Paleolithic around 11,700 years ago.
From there, studies on modern hunter-gatherer communities become a little more useful, as a decline in populations of large animals and fragmentation of cultures around the world saw to more plant consumption, culminating in the Neolithic revolution of farming and agriculture.
But knowing where our ancestors sat in the food web has a big impact on understanding everything from our own health and physiology, to our influence over the environment in times gone by.
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