Avian influenza outbreaks trigger mass culling of millions of birds. Improving culling methods and prevention strategies can substantially reduce the welfare toll of outbreak responses.
Avian influenza outbreak response creates an acute welfare dilemma: allowing disease spread harms enormous numbers of animals, but the culling methods most commonly used cause significant suffering. Ventilation shutdown — turning off ventilation to raise temperatures until birds die of heat stress — takes hours and causes acute thermal distress throughout. More humane alternatives including whole-house gassing with CO2 or nitrogen exist but require infrastructure investment. The scale of recent outbreaks — hundreds of millions of birds — makes the choice of culling method one of the most consequential welfare decisions in modern animal agriculture.