Mass Poultry Culling

Cambodia manages H5N1 on small family farms without mass testing or flock destruction by simply isolating and sacrificing sick birds, with no manufactured shortage resulting. The policy is officially called 'culling,' but that term is a misnomer — actual culling is selective removal of sick individuals, not mass destruction of entire healthy flocks. The egg shortage is caused by government-ordered mass slaughter of poultry, not by birds dying from bird flu. Under current U.S. policy, an entire flock is destroyed if even one bird tests positive for bird flu. Farmers face a perverse financial incentive to comply with slaughter orders because the government compensates them at or above market rate for destroyed flocks. Entire flocks are systematically culled when H5N1 is confirmed on a farm to prevent further transmission. $1.25 billion in taxpayer money has been spent funding the mass poultry slaughter program.