Pandemics became a thing among humans when we moved into cities because the increase in population density meant the disease could spread faster than the population’s immunity could build. Chickens in the wild (insofar as “wild chicken” is a meaningful concept) indeed may not succumb to a pandemic, chickens in a factory farm spread disease rapidly amongst themselves.

Factory farms have been around for almost a century and that hasn't happened. Nothing's changed now, there's absolutely no empirical evidence that such a thing is happening.

you cannot be serious. disease among husbanded animal populations has been a problem since mankind began keeping animals. before vaccines, the only options available were cleanliness, inoculation, and culling, to include killing entire herds when even a single individual was found to carry a disease.

https://ourworldindata.org/how-rinderpest-was-eradicated

> Factory farms have been around for almost a century

So around the same time as the Spanish flu pandemic?

There's a difference between going extinct and having enough of a mass die-off to temporarily but significantly impact our economy and food supply. I think any regulatory policy would be trying to avoid the latter more than the former.

Chickens have survived for thousands of years, but not in quantities and conditions that we cultivate them in today to feed ourselves.

> Chickens have survived thousands of years without being rendered extinct by a virus

Sure, in an environment that’s completely different from an industrial farming operation.

> hyperventilation bureaucrats

If they didn’t cull our poultry industry—as a whole—would be ineligible for export to most countries.

Apart from all the chicken that did go extinct...

If you think about it, veterinarians are a evolutionary adaptation as well!

I'd be careful with that - in the past there were no "mega-chicken-factories" that you'd find nowadays. So you can't quite compare spread of viruses in chicken today with the last "thousands of years" without very large asterisks

Edit: stetrain phrased it better :)

Clearly you misunderstood GP. Bird flu in a farm mean at worst 5% death rate for them, so clearly death isn't why GP talked about the danger for big ag.

In my country, if any factory farm is hit by any virus, the meat is considered tainted and cannot be sold (wouldn't be bought by big retailers anyway) until the virus is cleared.

For poultry it can means 3 months of throwing eggs away. It's more economical to kill all the chickens and start from scratch. If the contamination reach your neighbours, they will do the same thing (so you want to do it early, and radically).

You clearly have never heard of Marek’s disease:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek's_disease

Current strains are hitting 100% mortality rates in unvaccinated chickens, and it can spread over a mile on the wind. Wild turkeys are asymptomatic carriers.

I don't they're doing it because they're worried about chickens dying out so that's a strange counter

Population density matters for disease spread, and population density of animals in any agricultural settings will be orders of magnitude higher than in natural state.

There might be more chickens in one mega-farm than there used to be in the wild in their original homeland in Southeast Asia.

Maybe you shoulf ask a poultry farmer for an informed opinion. If you do, link to it here.

Currently you're just parroting conspiratorial disinformation.

I did a web search for you (it's not difficult, you should try it one day) and this came up:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm7d2yv878o