Everyone continues to lose it over H5N1. The Economist opines that the Turkish government should stop allowing villagers to raise their own chickens, apparently preferring that they confine all chicken raising to industrial breeds in the kind of industrial chicken concentration camps that are breeding factories for diseases, then SELL them to the peasants. Yeah, in the Urfa Wal- Mart-- that'll work. Meanwhile the Turkish government alternates between denial and ordering mayors to confiscate chickens-- one is reported to have in turn ordered children to round them up. John Burchard reports that farmers are sending all their sick and poor birds to market on trucks. Meanwhile, Russia has announced that it will ban tourism to Turkey in the spring if the flu is not under control...
Meanwhile in an AP report a turkish villager is quoted saying that he wll never touch birds again. I wonder how much of what I saw last month is already gone? Of course, village culture may be more resilient than that....
Pluvialis of Fretmarks had some pungent comments on lost biocultural resources and the mindset of bureaucrats vs peasants in a note this AM:
"As for the pigeon thing, sigh. The Economist aside made me mad. And then it made me laugh, because it reminded me of a story I heard years ago about a NGO project that tried to teach Peruvian villagers (who keep guinea pigs in their houses, yes? to eat on celebration and feast days) that in fact, with a bit of western farming know-how, they could set up battery guinea-pig farms so they could have protein-rich guinea-pig every day of the week! It seemed so obvious to the NGO! And the response, after hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in, and pilot projects set up, was hilarious. Peruvian villagers said, great, that's really clever. But we only eat them on feast days and celebrations. That's what we do. And we like to keep them in our houses. So go away and leave us alone. Excellent."
She also sent this interesting link to some theories about things other than migrating birds that could be spreading the disease. Makes sense to me. For one thing, birds don't generally migrate laterally. For another, chickens don't spend a lot of time hanging out with migrants-- ducks, maybe, but not chickens.
Meanwhile, courtesy of Walter Hingley, a story from the ultra- right Russian nationalist, that always- reliable paranoiac, sometime polygamy advocate, and rabid anti- Semite, the redoubtable Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has a new good idea: keep the flu (and birds) at bay with "rifles":
“We must force the government to stop the bird migration,” Zhirinovsky said. “We must shoot all birds, field all our men and troops ... and force migratory birds to stay where they are.”
Yeah, THAT'll work!
What will likely hapen is that something totally unforeseen will show up, like the Mexican hemorrhagic fever that according to the February Discover may have been what REALLY did in the Aztecs-- and still may be out there..
(Not on line, yet).
2 comments:
In the meantime, here's a Mexican hemorrhagic fever link: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/432138
Looks to me as though feeding poultry litter to fish and then the fish to poultry is another of our human interferences in the name of conserving and recycling -- like a greenhouse heated by bunnies who eat whatever is leftover in the greenhouse -- that has gone wrong by removing natural barriers to the constant moving and morphing of genetic code which includes flu. I think we think too much in terms of animals and not enough in terms of genetic code, which is constantly dynamic and the key to evolution. Evolution is not an unmixed good as it may evolve us OUT.
Prairie Mary
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