Animal agriculture wants to hide all the animal abuse and filth that is found in these places.

The strain the teen has is already confirmed to not to originate from any farms in the region.

I think the ag-gag piece is the real story here. I grew up (a zillion years ago… the 80s and 90s) in southern AB and my first paid job at 12yrs old was in a factory chicken barn for $12/hr, which was more at the time than mom was making as a union gov’t worker in a hospital with many years of tenure.

My job was to walk the barns for the first 3 to 5 hours of every day, culling. My job was to kill chicks and full-grown hens (depending on the barn) that looked ill, deformed, or even just that moved slow or weirdly. My co-workers in this role were also 12. We were not supervised.

You can imagine a group of 12yr olds tasked with such a twisted thing, every business day for several hours per day. We grew bored of it. We normalized it the same way the (so-called) adults who placed us into these roles normalized it long before we ever got there, which is twisted as fuck on its own if you think about it.

We initially were taught to press the necks of the chicks/chickens against the rim of the buckets we carried to dislocate the spinal bones and crush the spine which was a pretty quick and obvious death for the birds, but it didn’t always go as planned. Obviously some fought, or others you felt what you thought was the neck snapping but it didn’t in fact snap and the bird struggled and lived horrendously inside the bucket for an hour or more while others were piled on top of it.

As pre-teens go, we fucked around and found out. Eventually, working together in a group and being the young assholes that we were, we started gamifying it. In some cases I remember that we would find birds that “needed culling” and pick them up by their heads and swing them around with as much centrifugal force as we could summon until their bodies ripped away from their necks. The head would be in our hand, the body of the bird would go flying, blood everywhere. The lower part doing “the funky chicken”. The game matured into us trying to hit each other with the bodies of the birds.

You can see the problem here, I hope. With 12yr olds being employed in such a fucking grim environment. With no adult supervision. In fact with wider community acceptance and even encouragement from a town of adults who didn’t see any problem with it. And even further with poor parents who saw their pre-teen kid “gainfully employed” and already making “more money than them” for a summer job. They were fucking proud and even envious of us. My own stepdad tried many times to steal the money I earned at this, my first paying summer job.

TL:DR this shit is still happening in 2024, as evidenced by the current story linked from the post. Like actually fuck H5N1 in a real way. Why are kids working in these environments at all? And who the fuck accepts that agribusiness giants are allowed to influence laws that protect them from whistleblowing???

I had no smartphone or even access to cameras that weren’t the size of lunch bags at that time. So the ag-gag laws in question are an obvious response to available tech and cultural norms shifting away from letting them get away with this shit. Anybody reading this thing should really wonder at how and why the younger generations and immigrants are being fucked with and silenced in such obvious ways in this era.

Fuck everything about this story from start to finish. Actually.