Editor’s note: This column is published here with the permission of the author, Leah Garcés. 

Over the past few months, news reports of China’s African swine fever problem, which is decimating the country’s pig population, has dominated agriculture and trade headlines. The disease outbreak has affected markets across the globe, from Brazil to the United States to Europe, as China is a pork powerhouse. At any one moment, China houses half of all pigs in the world — up to 700 million animals — and scientists estimate that as many as half could be infected and killed once the epidemic has taken its full toll. As the world grapples with a shortage of Chinese pork and crashing demand for the soy fed to these pigs, the question is this: How can we avoid these catastrophes in the future?

Some U.S. farmers are looking to cash in on the Chinese hog crisis, but that’s like throwing stones when you live in a glass house. While African swine fever hasn’t made it to the United States yet, we’ve had our share of disease outbreaks that have roiled rural America, resulting in severe economic loss and market disruptions. 

No industry better illustrates the precarious nature of our food system than the chicken meat industry, which essentially is the meat industry, considering 90 percent of all farmed land animals are chickens. Chicken is America’s favorite protein, and our consumption and production are higher today than they’ve ever been. These animals are packed wall to wall in dark warehouses across the country, living on their own feces, until they are transported to slaughter and eventually end up on our dinner plates. 

The warehouses are breeding grounds for many diseases, from headliners like campylobacter and salmonella to lesser-known but equally menacing ones. One such bacterial disease, “gangrenous dermatitis,” infects soft tissue and causes feather loss, dark red or blue-green lesions, and areas of macerated skin. Once infected, birds can die within 24 hours. Gangrenous dermatitis has been described as the “number one health problem” facing U.S. chicken companies. 

Other causes for concern are diseases stemming from the birds’ unnaturally fast growth rate. Chickens have been selectively bred to grow very large very fast to satisfy our desire for cheap breast meat. The result is muscle disorders such as “woody breast,” “white striping,” and an even stranger one called “spaghetti meat.” The names say it all. And while there is no threat to humans here, the texture and appearance make the meat inedible. Conservatively, these conditions have cost the industry more than $200 million per year.

Chicken warehouses supply most of America’s protein, but they are treated more like biohazard waste sites than the origins of our food. Our chicken production system is so fragile and the birds so immunologically incompetent — due to overcrowding and stress — that to simply tour one of these facilities, one must wear the equivalent of a hazmat suit to prevent disease entry from the outside. 

Given how common animal disease outbreaks are and how disruptive they can be for consumers, companies, and animals, it’s disappointing to hear that in the wake of yet another epidemic, this time in China’s hog farms, meat industry executives are preparing to do more of the same: make industrialized animal farms “even more” biosecure. But disease always finds a way. All it takes is one bacterium or virus on the edge of an article of clothing or the tip of an exposed boot for disease to explode in these settings and spread like wildfire to neighboring countries. For example, this recent outbreak of African swine fever in China has spread to Vietnam, Mongolia, Korea, Cambodia, and Laos.

Despite industry’s best efforts, animal disease pandemics continue to plague our food system, destabilizing trade and markets and causing product shortages and even more animal suffering. We now face two choices. The first is the status quo: keep packing more and more animals into closer and closer quarters, throwing artilleries of protective measures at them — from visitors wearing biohazard suits to routine dosing with antibiotics and extra biosecurity regimes—all to meet the protein demands of a population set to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050. We can hope for the best and prepare for the worst, including the real possibility that diseases will jump the species barrier and cause a human pandemic. 

Or we could take a cold, hard look at our protein production systems and think critically about what they give us in exchange for what they take from us. We could reinvent protein production altogether. 

This second choice is the smarter and more profitable one. With products like the Impossible Burger now in Burger Kings nationwide, the Just Egg only a click away on Amazon Now, and Beyond Meat’s 20-year record IPO, the question becomes this: Why risk it? 

In 2015, 87 percent of birds infected with avian flu were egg-laying hens. This caused a major egg shortage and a movement among companies to eliminate eggs from their offerings or explore plant-based products like Just Egg. But still, each year as fall approaches, egg farmers across the country go on lockdown, doing everything in their power to ward off another avian flu outbreak. 

Instead of waiting for calamity to strike, why not make a proactive shift away from this fragile, disease-laden protein production model? 

After all, major meat producers from Smithfield to Tyson to Perdue are now incorporating plant-based meat into their product lines. This is the ultimate win-win. The time is ripe to reboot our protein supply and create one that doesn’t require us to wear a biohazard suit.

About the author: Leah Garcés is the president of Mercy For Animals and author of Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry.

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Since then, the changes within the food corporations and producers have been astounding. 

Jim Perdue, once the villain of the very video that Kristof refers to, took the path of reformed sinner.  A year after the article, he was quoted saying “We need happier birds.”

Since then Perdue Farms, the country’s third largest chicken company, has announced a series of improvements. These include installing windows for natural light in 25 percent of their chicken houses, and working on better breeds of birds. 

Major companies like Compass Foods, Aramark, Subway and Burger King have all committed to switching to better breeds of birds and giving them more space. In fact, nearly 90 national chains have stepped up to improve the lives of chickens. 

But one company is glaringly absent from the list of leaders. McDonald’s insists  they need to ‘study’ the issue more. With a wealth of scientific studies already conducted on higher chicken welfare, McDonald’s study approach seems the hallmark of a corporation avoiding a necessary decision. 

The breed of bird currently used by McDonald’s is nothing short of a genetic monster. She’s been selectively bred to grow so big, so fast, that she can suffer from heart attacks and leg pain. Most of the birds just sit, only getting up to eat or drink out of necessity, but otherwise find it too uncomfortable or even painful to walk. Some can’t walk at all, and have to be euthanized even before they reach their slaughter date. 

Yet a solution exists. It might require hard work, grit, and commitment because of the sheer size of the industry, but McDonalds is not usually shy of such things. Afterall, McDonald’s led the way on committing to 100 percent cage free eggs, reducing calories in  kids meals, and environmental responsibility. Their resistance to improving the lives of chickens in a meaningful way remains an anomaly.

The finish line has already been set by consumers. The public will not accept a company turning a blind eye to poor animal welfare when there is a known solution.  A case in point is Chicago mom ShaRhonda Dawson. She was so frustrated  with McDonald’s and their refusal to do better for chickens that she started a change.org petition that now has over 100,000 signatures.

In addition, the leading animal protection organizations in the country are organized and unified in asking McDonald’s to say goodbye to badly bred birds. 

Every day Mcdonald’s avoids that decision further alienates them from their informed and compassionate consumers. And that is never a good thing for any business. The question for McDonald’s is not what will it cost them to improve the lives of the chickens in their supply chain, but rather, what will it cost them not to? 

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The current trend to keep stakeholders and consumers in the dark through ag-gag policies and through exclusion, such as at this meeting, will only further work to degrade trust between the public and the poultry industry. A diverse collection of organizations banded together this week through a joint statement to request that the sustainability workshop and any future such discussion open their doors to a more collaborative process whereby those most impacted by the poultry industry are included in the discussion shaping the future, not just for the industry, but for our food and farming system.

The poultry industry has had a poor track record on three major areas of public concern: workers, farmers and animal welfare. A week does not go by without an abuse story reaching headlines. These come from a range of organizations with different interests, from Oxfam America exposing processing workers wearing diapers because they don’t get bathroom breaks, to RAFI’s work to show injustices to the farmers, to Compassion in World Farming’s work to expose inhumane treatment of chickens. The signals are clear: The poultry industry is in serious public relations trouble. Is this “sustainability workshop” nothing more than a masked effort to get ahead of these troubled waters rather than a true effort to solve these very real and serious problems facing the poultry industry?

Transparency and inclusion are critical to a sustainable food and farming system. Exclusion, on the other hand, leads to lack of trust and missed opportunities for the best outcome. Investors are increasingly watching how the food industry manages the risks in its supply chain, in particular animal welfare. The future of the industry relies on good management of these areas, and that will require a transparent and collaborative approach.

More than four years ago, the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply embarked on a similar process, one that ended in disaster for the egg industry. While the coalition defined five areas of sustainability (Animal Health and Well-Being, Food Safety and Quality, Environmental Impact, Worker Health and Safety, and Food Affordability), they, too, chose to exclude key groups that represented consumers’ concerns. The result was, when the study emerged from the coalition in favor of enriched cages, it was sharply rejected by consumer and animal welfare advocates. Today, more than 120 key food companies have gone against the coalition’s favoring of enriched cages, citing clear scientific and consumer rejection of cages. As the poultry industry embarks on a similar process as the egg industry, it would seem best practice to include, rather than exclude, groups from each of these sectors to ensure the best outcome.

If the industry does truly wish to sustain itself and be sustainable, it must consider a more collaborative process. Sustainability of the industry does not mean business as usual or speaking in an echo chamber. It means working collaboratively toward a truly sustainable practice, even when everyone is not in agreement.

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Back in December 2014, Compassion in World Farming released a video showing chickens raised in tightly packed warehouses, laying on feces-ridden litter and with red, raw bellies. To make matters worse, Perdue had been calling their production system “natural” and “humanely raised.”

The video went viral overnight after being featured in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof and today has more than 2 million views. Consumers were outraged. On the one hand, the company was marketing their birds as antibiotic-free. But, on the other hand, the video revealed dirty, overcrowded, suffering birds — a far cry from what consumers imagined from a “natural” label.

Until this past weekend’s article, it was uncertain whether Perdue was doing anything to address the welfare issues raised in the video. The video called for more space, natural light and slower growth to address inherent leg problems. At the time, Perdue blamed whistleblower Craig Watts for poor management practices rather than taking responsibility. In reality, they had simply run before they could walk. They had taken out antibiotics before addressing the conditions causing suffering in birds.

In the article, Jim Perdue states: “What you think is humane treatment of an animal and what I think is humane treatment of an animal can be different.”

It would seem that in the past months, Perdue has been exploring exactly just what good animal welfare does mean and the latest science on that. Bruce Stewart-Brown, who is in charge of animal welfare at Perdue, visited the EU to learn more about progress in animal welfare, indicating that Perdue is investing in researching better systems. He even refers to touring higher-welfare indoor systems that use windows to bring natural light to the birds, a system already in practice in England, and one advocated by Compassion in World Farming.

Professor Marian Stamp Dawkins, revered animal behavior scientist at Oxford University, has recently begun talking about a simple definition for animal welfare. In her book, “Why Animals Matter: Animal Consciousness, Animal Welfare, and Human Well-being,” she says it comes down to some simple questions: Is the animal healthy? Does the animal have what the animal needs and wants? Stewart-Brown refers to this definition in the article — an exciting evolution from the often-simplistic look at welfare where only health is considered.

The article finishes off with a significant statement from Jim Perdue. “We need happier birds.” It’s an admission that they aren’t happy now, and that Perdue should do better.

Do we dare feel a glimmer of hope for chickens? Perdue has perhaps begun an important and much-needed journey. Where they have led the way on antibiotics, perhaps they will take up the same leadership position when it comes to welfare. But, for now, conditions remain the same for chickens, and consumers will continue to need to keep a watchful eye.

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