By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – University of San Diego Prof. Aaron S. Gross, a former president of the Society of Jewish Ethics, on Tuesday cited four reasons why industrialized farming of animals – especially chickens — is likely to be the cause of a future pandemic.
In a Zoom presentation to a joint meeting of the the Food and Soil Committee of San Diego 350 and the Interfaith Coalition for Earth Justice, Gross quoted the Center for Disease Control and Prevention that “infectious disease is overwhelmingly zoonotic,” or, in other words, it is typically passed between animals and humans.
The biggest sources of interaction between animals and humans, he added, are the animals that we routinely eat. In his talk he focused on the poultry industry, which, he said, poses a pandemic threat because of its scale, its genetic uniformity, the chronic illness of the birds, and the disruption it causes in traditional societies.
In terms of scale, Gross said the poultry industry is producing more than 100 times the amount of chickens it did a century ago, when they were expensive to raise and relatively rare on people’s dinner plates. Currently, he said the poultry industry is producing about 9 billion chickens a year, with the worldwide total being approximately 65 billion.
Prior to the 1950s, chickens were of many varieties. Since then, however, Gross said, they have been genetically modified to a single industrialized variety that can be grown three times as quickly on a fraction of the feed they once required. While that is economically advantageous to the poultry industry, the uniformity of the chickens raised all over the world means that viral diseases can spread very quickly among them.
The emphasis within the industry on growing the chickens quickly has had an adverse impact on the chickens’ immunological systems, according to Gross. With their bodies concentrating on growth, the chickens have less ability to fight off disease. Thus, they suffer from chronic illnesses, the professor said.
The growth of the industrialized chicken industry has caused most traditional chicken farmers to go out of business and to look for alternatives. Gross said this was seen in China with an increase in the capture and sale of wild bats at “wet markets” – which, in Wuhan, China, is considered the possible origin of the coronavirus pandemic.
Gross said that just one of the mass producers of chicken in China produces one billion chickens a year, A similar pattern may be seen with pigs, he added. So, traditional farmers, with government encouragement, turn to capturing wildlife, not only in China, but also in India and other parts of the world, according to Gross.
Gross said major factory farming operators exercised tremendous political influence on the administration of former President Donald Trump and may have equal sway with that of President Joe Biden. During the Trump administration, he said, many slaughterhouse workers were declining to go to work; their chances of losing a limb in the slaughtering process amounting to two persons a week. Gross said these big companies couldn’t force the workers to go back to work lest there be another accident, for which they could be sued. So, they went to President Trump and asked for their labor force to be declared “essential workers,” needed by the nation during the pandemic. The effect of this declaration, he said, was to transfer potential liability for any future accidents to the taxpayers rather than to the poultry industry.
The University of San Diego professor said one way to reduce the chances of another pandemic is to lessen people’s desire to eat animals, and to instead promote vegetarian alternatives. He suggested that the City of San Diego be encouraged to adopt a food policy that would emphasize vegetarian alternatives wherever possible. Additionally, he said, as a matter of ethics, when religious institutions and other groups have group meal functions, they should consider modifying their menus so that vegetarian dishes are the first suggested among various options.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com