Originally posted by: Inigo Montoya
Here's a question for you, if a population of birds or cattle get a flu, should all of them be culled? Why kill the survivors? Those are the ones with immunity. The policy is to massacre everything.
Because virtually every communicable illness or disease known to man, infecting humans, animals, or both, has a gestation period, when the infected individual shows no symptoms. So if you kill off only the individual animals that are obviously sick, the disease will re-emerge. The only exception would be if the disease isn't very communicable and the animals didn't live in close proximity to one another--like horses that are pastured and individually stabled. But bird flu IS virulent AND chickens live in dense, crowded groups.
Since 8000 BC, when animals were first domesticated, farmers have known that the only solution is to kill all the infected animals AND all the others with which they may have come in contact. It's the only way.
Also keep in mind that a successful pathogen not only doesn't kill its host immediately, it doesn't immediately cause symptoms to manifest--so the infected individual can wander among the as-yet uninfected population. Like with covid. And like with bird flu.
