Heat wave in US kills thousands of chickens and turkeys

Thousands of chickens and turkeys at farms in North Carolina and Kansas died as temperatures soared to around 43C (110F) this week.

About 50,000 chickens died at a facility in North Carolina after the power went off for about 45 minutes, and about 4,300 turkeys died on one day at a Kansas farm. "It felt like a war zone. It felt like hell," the Huffington Post quoted Holly Capron as saying of the experience at the farm where she and her husband raise 22,000 turkeys for Butterball LLC. She said they were using large fans and fog nozzles, and sprayed the birds to cool them down. On Saturday 140 perished, but on Sunday there were 4,300 deaths. She added that it took 26 hours to bury all of the birds in a large hole. The Kansas Department of Agriculture confirmed that the deaths were caused by heat. Pilgrim's Pride Corp. owned the chickens which died during the power failure in Kansas. Fans are usually used to push mist over the birds or pull air though the sheds at high speed, but when there is no power the birds are left packed tightly inside a quickly heating building. "With the new ventilation systems in these houses, they can handle the heat pretty good," the Huffington Post quoted Bob Ford, executive director of the North Carolina Poultry Federation, as saying. "Most everybody's converted their houses to that type of system, and you just have to keep your fingers crossed I guess." Animals live in extremely crowded conditions on factory farms, so there is little air circulation without power. "With no air circulating, usually no trees shading them, extreme heat and humidity and the hundreds if not thousands of bodies in close contact with each other spells death," nc4bo commented on the Democratic Underground. "Still I wonder why there was no back up generators available for emergency use. No water sprinklers either. I have no idea what happens when a big hurricane blows through." Haaretz reported that more than a million chickens died as the result of a heat wave in Israel last year. Farm Sanctuary addresses several issues around factory farmed poultry including the spread of disease, physical malformations which result in large, quickly-growing birds, and the suffering of the animals.