Emily Elconin/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Culling has been standard practice during the avian flu outbreak. But the term doesn’t begin to hint at the cruel reality that hides behind it.
As egg prices rise, so does the culling — a word that hides a stark reality most Americans never confront. While we debate substitutes and share fears about inflation, millions of birds experience final moments so brutal they would constitute criminal acts if inflicted on a single backyard chicken. These deaths — by deliberate heat stroke and carbon dioxide asphyxiation — are neither swift nor merciful, but calculated acts of expedience hidden behind industry jargon. Culling — that distant, bloodless term that refers to scenes of unimaginable suffering currently unfolding within massive industrial barns — exposes the profound disconnect between our collective morality and the true cost of breakfast.
This is the breathtaking contradiction of our current moment: our capacity to meticulously track economic ripples while remaining ignorant to the suffering that created them.
This calculated suffering exists not because it’s necessary, but because it’s expedient.
I know something about animal care and what’s possible when we choose to see animals as beings rather than units of production. As a child, I apprenticed in my father’s veterinary practice, first sweeping floors and washing kennels, later assisting at the front desk and participating in procedures. For three decades, I’ve watched him cradle trembling shorthairs, steady panicking retrievers, and gently comfort animals who can’t speak a word. His hands — calloused and gentle — move with equal reverence across a champion show dog and a mangy stray. When an animal was beyond saving, he administered euthanasia with measured compassion — a swift, painless release preceded by sedation to ensure no fear, no panic in those final moments. We owed them dignity, he would say, especially at the end.
This principle guided every decision in his practice: that suffering should be minimized, that fear should be acknowledged, that each creature — regardless of species or status — deserved to be treated individually, with pain that mattered. At his clinic, no being was reduced to a statistic or an economic unit. Each had a name, a history, and people who cared for them. This is what humane treatment looks like when we actually mean it.
The memory jars violently against the current reality of American industrial farming, where approximately 400 million hens exist in confinement. These animals — each capable of pain, fear, and social attachment — are treated as disposable production units, their lives cut short at just 18 months when their egg-laying capacity wanes. The broiler chicken industry proves equally merciless, engineering birds whose bodies grow so rapidly that their skeletal systems often collapse beneath them — a systematic cruelty we’ve normalized in pursuit of profit.
When H5N1 infiltrates these operations, our response reveals the depths of our ethical collapse. Industry protocols deploy mass culling methods so barbaric they would constitute criminal animal cruelty in any other context. Water-based foam suffocation takes 14 agonizing minutes to kill a chicken. In a process clinically termed “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), ventilation systems deliberately shut down, temperatures crank past 104 degrees, and carbon dioxide is pumped in until thousands of birds convulse and suffocate. Their deaths aren’t quick. They aren’t merciful. They aren’t necessary in their cruelty.
This practice has a name in regulatory documents and industry protocols. It has approval from agricultural authorities. What it doesn’t have is moral justification.
The normalization of mass culling in American agriculture emerged in the mid-20th century alongside the industrialization of animal farming. What began as occasional disease-control measures in the 1940s and 1950s became standardized protocol by the 1970s, when factory farming proliferated and concentrated thousands of animals in confined spaces, creating perfect conditions for disease transmission. Following several devastating outbreaks in the 1980s, the USDA formalized “depopulation” protocols that prioritized speed and cost-efficiency over humane handling. The 2014-2015 avian influenza crisis marked a turning point when VSD+ gained widespread acceptance despite veterinary concerns, permanently embedding the practice in our agricultural system. Industry consolidation further cemented these methods, as vertical integration placed culling decisions in the hands of a small number of corporations incentivized to protect profits over animal welfare. What started as an emergency response transformed into standard operating procedure.
Yet our national conversation about eggs remains stubbornly fixated on supply chains and breakfast-menu pivots. Major news outlets publish egg-free baking tips alongside economic analysis of market disruptions, as if we’re merely experiencing a temporary inconvenience rather than witnessing mass torture. The deaths themselves become statistical footnotes, bureaucratic inevitabilities, the unfortunate cost of doing breakfast.
Our response to bird flu reveals not just a policy failure but a crisis of empathy and compassion — a profound to recognize suffering when acknowledging it might inconvenience us.
Meanwhile, countries like the Netherlands have rejected ventilation shutdown in favor of more humane approaches to disease control — albeit only slightly. Dutch poultry farmers utilize mobile units equipped with nitrogen chambers that render birds unconscious before causing death — a method that, while still resulting in the birds’ demise, dramatically reduces their suffering. In the U.K., controlled atmosphere killing (CAK) systems deliver inert gases that cause birds to lose consciousness before experiencing the distress of asphyxiation. Belgium employs foam-based methods paired with pre-stunning techniques that minimize birds’ conscious awareness.
The science behind humane culling isn’t mysterious either. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s own guidelines acknowledge that methods like ventilation shutdown should be considered only as a last resort when other approaches are impossible. Yet in the United States, economic considerations repeatedly trump welfare concerns. The more humane alternatives add between 20 to 25 cents per bird — pennies that accumulate into millions across an industry with margins thinner than an eggshell. When scaled across the hundreds of millions of birds in American factory farms, these pennies become prohibitive within a system designed to maximize efficiency above all else.
Today, we can no longer avoid the reality that our food comes from somewhere, from someone. Our response to bird flu reveals far more than a failure of agricultural policy. It exposes a profound fracture in our collective capacity for compassion, a willful blindness that allows us to acknowledge suffering only when doing so requires nothing of us. We’ve constructed elaborate psychological barriers that allow us to feel anguish over an abused dog while remaining unmoved by the torturous deaths of millions of equally sentient cocks and hens.
What would it look like if our food system honored our capacity for compassion rather than exploiting our talent for looking away?
I think of those moments in my father’s veterinary practice, where suffering was minimized, where each animal was seen as an individual worthy of dignity. This wasn’t exceptional care; it was the bare minimum of ethical treatment. Yet the disconnect between how we treat the animals we name and those we consume has never been more profound.
The truth is that we cannot justify any system that treats sentient beings as production units destined for suffering. These industrial practices aren’t aberrations: They’re the logical conclusion of treating animals as commodities rather than as beings capable of the same pain and fear my father recognized in his patients. We must reckon not only with how our food dies, but also with whether that death — and the life preceding it — can ever align with the compassion we would demand for any creature in our care. Perhaps the most honest response to our broken food system isn’t finding slightly less cruel options, but reimagining our relationship with animals altogether.
