Mexico Kills 8 Million Chickens To Contain H7N3 Virus

An anonymous reader writes "Mexico has so far slaughtered eight million chickens and vaccinated 66 million more in an effort to contain a bird flu outbreak in the west of the country, officials said Tuesday. The country's agriculture ministry had identified the diseased chickens during the vaccination process in the Los Altos region of Jalisco state, which led to the destruction of the H7N3-carrying birds."

Re:Chickenicide

[DRJlaw]

If 8 million humans were slaughtered, we would call it a Holocaust.
If 8 million chickens were slaughtered, we would call it......well nothing, we wouldn't even blink an eyelid at the thought.

One is sentient, the other is pretty decidedly not sentient. One is not-food (for almost all), the other is pretty decidedly food (for almost all). One has a total population of about 7 billion, one has a population birth rate of about 50 billion per year.

You don't complain about the bacterial holocaust that you wreak when you bathe (and I hope that you do bathe)... so where do you propose to draw the line?

Its amazing and disturbing how totally blasé we are at killing mammals.

They are only chickens, amiright?

Chickens: class aves, descended from distant ancestors that ate our distant ancestors. Class also includes hawks, falcons, and other aves that are blase at killing aves and mammals. Humans: class mammalia, demonstrated to have raised and eaten chicken for the past round-about 8000 years. Class also includes canines, felines, and other mammals that are blase about killing mammals and aves.

So long as they were slaughtered using reasonable practices, I neither feel amazed nor disturbed.