THE CHICKENS FIGHT BACK, WITH DUCKS
WHEN, IN 1997, Lam Hoi-Ka, a previously healthy three-year-old boy, died of multiple organ failure in Hong Kong, no one suspected what a world-changing event this would be. When a team of virologists from the Netherlands declared that the death-dealing agent was H5N1, a virus that was previously known only to infect birds, scientists were shocked. Every year people around the world came down with “the flu,” but not this one, and never a virus directly from chickens. The theoretical possibility of a deadly global pandemic, similar to the 1918 flu that killed millions of people, was suddenly made real.
It is worth trying to remember how different the world was in 1997. Few people anywhere in the world owned personal computers. Even in 2003, when SARS first made headlines, Facebook was essentially an online college locker room where boys rated girls, Twitter had not yet been invented, and the idea that major news organizations might go online was treated by many in the news business with derision.
All this is to say that when bird flu first catapulted to world attention, most of us got our news from newspapers or television.
While virologists and epidemiologists from around the world urgently tracked down the origins and initial spread of the new virus, most of the rest of us watched the television images of people walking around in white body-covering suits designed for dealing with hazardous materials (hence: hazmat suits). They looked a little like the outfits beekeepers wear, except that these workers were carrying away and dumping garbage bags full of dead chickens.
Influenza viruses are simple, tiny things: eight segments of ribonucleic acid, or RNA, packed into a string or sphere about 80 to 100 nanometers in diameter (think billionths of meters; a hair shaft is about 100,000 nanometers, a bacterium about 1,000). Being small, and not, technically, alive, they can get away with stuff bigger things cannot. For instance, they can commandeer the machinery of a living cell to reproduce. Once inside, they are sloppily promiscuous, sharing bits and pieces, it seems, with whoever happens to be around. These viruses, classified as types A, B, C, and D, circulate in people, pigs, horses, birds, mink, cats, whales, and seals.
As with personality types in people, type A is the most worrisome to health workers. Type A is subdivided according to their HA (hemagglutinin, of which there are at least sixteen types) and NA (neuraminidase) antigens (projections that stick out of the lipid envelope surrounding the RNA; there are about nine types of these). In chickens, a particular subtype of influenza A causes disease known historically as fowl plague; there are low pathogenic avian influenza (LPAI) strains and highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) strains. HPAI can kill a lot of chickens quickly.
The many different combinations of the influenza virus genes vary almost infinitely in their ability to cause disease, which depends not just on the virus itself but on the genetics, health, nutritional status, and organizational structure of the populations into which they are introduced. The combination that was creating the greatest anxiety around the world in 2006 was H5N1 (hemagglutinin type 5, neuraminidase type 1); although it is not easily transmitted, when it does transmit to other birds, to cats, to people, and to a variety of other species, it is unusually lethal. Influenza viruses were not supposed to behave this badly.
What made the 1997 news images confusing and alarming were the stories that accompanied them. In Hong Kong, a chicken-adapted virus had jumped directly to a person. This hadn’t been reported before.
In Canada and elsewhere, people in hazmat suits were disposing of chickens that were said to be infected with LPAI, which was said to be not of concern to humans. But why, then, were they wearing those white suits? What wasn’t made explicit, at least as I recall, was that LPAI viruses can mutate into HPAI variants rather quickly.
For scientists, politicians, and just plain folks, this was surreal. None of us had a satisfying story that would explain, and hopefully give some reasonable context to, the images. For most people, chickens were “healthy, low-fat” meat you bought in plastic packages at the grocery store, not agents of mass death.
As a veterinarian and epidemiologist, my own chicken stories were different from those of many North Americans and Europeans, but offered equally unsatisfying explanations.
Between 1985 and 1987, I was on a contract with the Canadian International Development Agency near Yogyakarta, in Java, Indonesia. While I was working to set up a diagnostic laboratory for animal diseases, my wife, a nurse with a masters in health sciences, home-schooled the kids and worked as volunteer in community health.
Chickens were everywhere.
The bright, fierce, piercing cry startled me from sleep. Groggily, bathed in sweat, I pushed away the long, cylindrical pillow so beloved in all traditional Javanese hotels, which my Indonesian friends assured me was called a “Dutch wife.” In one stumbling motion, I swung out of bed, pulled my sarong around my waist, ran to the door, and stuck my head outside into the misty tropical air. Several yards away, on a low branch, perched the regal father of all chickens. His wattles were full, fleshy, and pink. Like the robes of some strutting bird-king, his cape flowed down from his crown, over his back, in brilliant bronze, rust, and gold, ending in a ruff of white. His lower chest and fountaining tail feathers shimmered in the early morning sunlight from deep black to blue to green. His sharp black eye caught mine and held it. This was not a bird to quietly back down from a challenge.
The red jungle fowl, and its gray and green siblings, was first domesticated in South and eastern Asia—India, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Java—many thousands of years ago. These birds were originally bred for cockfighting. From India, the birds explored westward into Persia, carrying with them their wild spirit, and, one assumes, the populations of viruses and bacteria living in their intestines. There is no evidence that they were considered a low-fat, low-cost, low-carb food or a public health threat.
The Zoroastrians praised cocks for driving out the devils of night and guarding the household. From Persia, the birds invaded both northern Africa and Europe. Although the “rosy-fingered Dawn” Homer described in The Odyssey was not accompanied by cockcrows, Aeschylus (late in the fifth century BC) has Athena (in the play The Eumenides) warning the Greeks that civil war is like cockfighting, an image (fierce, small-brained, beautiful birds passionately slashing each other to death) that some of us would extend to war in general, although cockfighting itself has perhaps more to recommend it.
The Romans used live chickens for augurs; if the birds eagerly ate food thrown to them, things would go well. If not, this was a poor omen. As might be expected, the chickens were kept underfed until omen-reading time came around. During a 249 BC battle against the Carthaginians at Drepana, in what is now western Sicily, the Roman consul P. Claudius Pulcher threw the sacred chickens overboard when they refused to eat, saying, “If they will not eat, let them drink.” Later the same day, the Carthaginians sank 93 of the consul’s 123 ships. The consul was promptly recalled and forced to pay a large fine. One could draw a lesson from this event, but it would be premature for me to pronounce omens so early in this story.
Later on that 1986 morning in Java, sipping my jasmine tea and nibbling on sweet buns, I watched a scattering of various-sized kampung (“village”) chickens scratching through the dirt between the buildings, under the banana, mango, and jackfruit trees, skittering out from under the wheels of predatory buses and trucks roaring by in clouds of dirty diesel on the nearby asphalt highway. A woman leaning forward on her motorcycle, a feathery bustle of chickens hung by their claws and flouncing out behind her, snarled past, heading to market. The rust and black feathers of the kampung birds, although thin and shabby by comparison with those of their wild cousins, still showed traces of royal blood.
In the late 1980s, in the local markets of Java, kampung chicken brought a premium price compared with the amount paid for their fast-growing, placid urban cousins. So precious were they that nothing was wasted. Our family dined at Nyonya Suharti’s, Java’s answer to KFC, in Yogyakarta, in the province of Central Java. The pieces were tasty, very tender, and finger-licking greasy.
“You know,” our nine-year-old son said, “in this country, some people eat the chicken heads and everything.”
I already knew about, and had tried, the curried soup made with chicken intestines. I looked at the batter-smothered piece of bird I had just set down and recognized a beak, a comb, and an eye. The brain was already eaten away—by me. Everyone at the table laughed uproariously at my lack of attention to what I had been eating.
“That’s something to write home about,” laughed my wife, Kathy.
“The brain tasted like liver,” I said.
Kathy looked down at her plate, at the piece she had just finished: a beak, a comb, an eye, the brain eaten away.
“I wondered what that was,” she said.
Eating the brains of chickens does not have the same moral or infectious-disease baggage that eating monkey brains does. Still, even for someone who was, when faced with some straggling bits of dinner left on the plate, reminded about the starving children of India, the idea that some cultures really do take to heart the adage “Waste not, want not” can be disconcerting. And if there was no waste at the dinner end, neither was there waste at the farm end. Unlike their urban cousins, the village birds were fed nothing except scraps, required no extra building investments, and provided for their human neighbors’ food, entertainment, and a sense of wonder at the beauty and cleverness of these silly birds.
Sometimes, as I drove through the country for my veterinary epidemiological work, I would pull over beside the narrow asphalt road to watch a line of ducks following a thin man, who carried a white flag flapping atop a bamboo staff. The man would have started from East Java, so I was told, with tiny ducklings. They would be imprinted on the white flag, following it like the dutiful, small-brained beauties that they are. The duck herder would stop at the watery muck of a rice field, where the ducks would forage all day, acting as pest controllers. At night, they would gather in a close flock around the white flag, for sleep and protection. The next day, they would walk on to another field, farther west.
Walking or swimming in roadside ditches, foraging in rice fields, they would make their way to Jakarta, far to the west, where the ducks would be sold. The flock leader would take their money, ride the train back to their home in the east, and start over. Not a bad life, I thought, for the ducks and their adopted parent. Good ecologically, good economically. And good, it turns out, for at least some of the viruses and bacteria that make their homes in bird poop.
A few years later, I stood in a broiler barn, that is, a barn where chickens are grown for meat, in southern Ontario. In my plastic boots and white throwaway safety suit (to protect the birds, not me) and a face mask (to keep the fine particles of litter-dust out of my lungs), I gazed out over ten thousand identical birds. The room was spacious and the litter was clean. Delivery of food, water, and air was computer controlled. The birds were white-feathered, plump, and only mildly curious about life. These were urban, office-dwelling birds. In five weeks, they could grow—uniformly, all of them—to the exact size required by KFC.
By the wonders of genetics and intensive breeding for specific traits, the fiercely wild stock of the jungle fowl had been transformed into something that could grow faster, more uniformly, and, by some standards, more efficiently. And if the genetic stock, the feed, and sometimes even the buildings were imported, and underpaid local labor used in place of underpriced fossil fuel, this feat could be accomplished just about anywhere in the world. This, too, is something amazing.
Between 1961 and 2017, world poultry meat production increased from 9 to 122 million tons, and egg production shot up from 15 to 87 million tons. Since most of us experience a sort of cognitive dissonance when we see chickens and tons in the same sentence, let me rephrase this. In 1961 there were just over 3 billion people and just under 4 billion chickens in the world. In 2 020, as I write this, a bout 7.7 billion people are jostling and shouting for space here, a long with more than 2 0 billion chickens—and perhaps as many as 50 billion if one considers the short slaughter-and-restock turnover of those populations.
The fastest growth in commercial poultry production has been in the developing world. By the late 1990s, countries such as Indonesia and Brazil were increasing their commercial production by about 10 percent a year. When I was visiting South Sudan in 2012, just a few months after it gained independence after thirty years of civil war, I found “fresh” Brazilian chicken for sale in the market in Juba, the capital. China, already one of the world’s biggest producers, was increasing chicken production at about 4 percent annually in the 1990s. Chickens were being grown, trucked, shipped, and fried as fast as the technology allowed. Who would have thought that so many people on this planet could be fed with such apparent ease?
Well, the geneticists helped. These birds feeding the world weren’t just any old chickens. In 2018, the authors of a peer-reviewed research paper declared that the “skeletal morphology, pathology, bone geochemistry and genetics” of modern commercial chickens—whose global body mass now exceeds that of all other birds combined—are so different from their ancestors that they may be considered a “novel morphotype” symbolizing “the unprecedented human reconfiguration of the Earth’s biosphere.”
Who would have thought human beings were so clever, and so naive? But in ecology—which is to say, in a world where everything is, sooner or later, connected to everything else—there are costs, and trade-offs. Who would have thought that this feat would also create the perfect conditions for barn-sized outbreaks—thousands of uniformly susceptible animals gathered under one roof—and then fit so neatly into a globally integrated system that created perfect conditions for a pandemic? By the end of the twentieth century, epidemiologists who specialize in food-borne diseases were already well aware that a pandemic of salmonellosis, a disease with both immediate effects on the gastrointestinal system and long-term effects on arthritis and cardiovascular disease, was one of the hidden costs of mass producing chicken (see my book Food, Sex and Salmonella for more on that).
This pandemic could have been taken as a warning, an omen from the chickens of the world, a shot across the bow, as it were. The omen was not cryptic. It might have been something like: chickens carry their own bacterial and viral microbiomes; the economies of scale for chicken production are the same as the economies of scale for disease; small farms have outbreaks; big farms breed epidemics; globalization of big farms creates pandemics. But, like Pulcher 2,200 years previously, humanity ignored the omen, threw the birds overboard, and put its faith in advances in food safety technology.
The omen having been ignored, few researchers in the late twentieth century would have stood in a chicken broiler barn and made the mental connections to ducks flying overhead, or to the populations of viruses and bacteria and parasites to whom the ducks are a quiet, comfortable vehicle for long-distance air travel. A few North American veterinarians, on thinking about ducks, might worry about them carrying the Newcastle disease virus that affects poultry, or the schistosome parasite that causes swimmer’s itch or duck itch in people. These schistosomes normally cycle from waterfowl through open water to snails and back out through open water to birds or muskrats. Unlike their cousins Schistosoma japonicum in Southeast Asia, which can cause serious harm, these parasites don’t actually like people. Their dives into human skin cause an allergic reaction and are kamikaze nosedives into itchy oblivion. But I digress.
Not long after visiting that secure, clean, broiler barn in Ontario, I stood outside in crisp fall sunshine next to the riffling waters of a beautiful Ontario marsh with a group of veterinary students learning about ecosystem health. In the crook of my arm, nestled on her back, was a wild mallard duck. I was swabbing her cloaca, the common passage where urine and feces come out. We were checking her for influenza virus, as part of a mock influenza outbreak.
Waterbirds such as geese and ducks were domesticated even before jungle fowl, probably in the “cradle of civilization,” the Middle East. Their intestines are the natural home for all sixteen known subtypes of influenza A viruses. You can test waterfowl of all sorts—ducks, geese, gulls—just about anywhere in the world and find some variations of them. Sharon Calvin found evidence of influenza infection in 80 percent of gulls in Toronto and Hamilton; many of the ducks we swabbed at that marsh as part of the mock influenza pandemic also harbored influenza viruses. It would have been surprising not to find them. For the most part, these influenza viruses in waterbirds are evolutionarily adapted and don’t cause any disease problems in their natural hosts. However, when waterfowl are mixed with chickens and pigs and people in close quarters—as my ecologically friendly farmer friends were doing in Southeast Asia—novel opportunities for the viruses are created, they become genetically more unstable, and evolution is accelerated.
In 1996, a precursor of the H5N1 virus killed some geese in southern China. No one paid much attention. Then the virus picked up some gene fragments from quail and ducks, spread to the poultry markets in Hong Kong, and made the leap to humans; it killed six of eighteen people who were infected. Mass killing of all the domestic poultry in Hong Kong temporarily stopped the problem, but the virus continued to infect ducks and geese and to happily, sloppily evolve. In late 2002, a new variation of the virus killed off most of the waterfowl in Hong Kong nature parks. In the next few years, the new, more lethal variant spread through Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, China, Malaysia—the whole regional market. Not only was it making birds sick and killing them, but it was also infecting cats and ferrets and, finally, people.
When I lived in Indonesia in the 1980s, farming appeared to be an agro-ecologist’s dream—lots of diversity, recycling of resources, low energy inputs. Influenza was a disease of people that periodically emerged from the creative microbial populations of southern China and wafted around the world, killing (mostly) older, already-debilitated people but generally leaving both non-human animals and the physically fit of our own species unscathed. Biodiversity in agriculture was seen as a solution, not a problem. So what happened?
Many commentators on the twentieth-century spread of influenza refer to the global pandemic of 1918, which started with American troops in Kansas and then spread around the world, but the stories go back much further than that. Hippocrates recorded an epidemic in 412 BC, and the name “influenza” itself comes from fifteenth-century Italy, referring to unexpected epidemics believed to be under the influence (influenza) of the stars. Not surprisingly, given the origins of chickens themselves, the first epidemic for which there is reasonably good information appears to have originated in Asia, before spreading to Africa and Europe. Ducks and chickens have been hanging around each other for a long time, and some kinds of influenza viruses have caused problems for as long as we can, collectively, remember. We learned to adjust; we monitored where the viruses came from and created vaccines. For most of the twentieth century, these practices kept matters more or less under control.
In May and June of 2005, one of the new variants of H5N1 killed more than five thousand wild bar-headed geese, gulls, and ducks in Qinghai Lake, China. Before they died, the affected birds had trouble standing and developed neurological problems (flopping around). Many researchers were worried that migratory birds would carry the virus down flyways into India. It looks as if they may have indeed carried the virus to Europe and Africa, but the evidence will always be ambiguous, and the world trade in poultry, both official and unofficial, remains an alternative explanation for how the disease has spread. To transport the virus, the wild birds have to be alive; if it is killing them, they stay where they are. If they survive, it could be because they have developed immunity or because the virus has evolved into something less pathogenic. In August 2006, the same virus turned up in cats in northern Iraq; so, however it was being transported and however dangerous it might be, it was certainly off to see the world.
Migratory birds carry all kinds of influenza viruses around the world, but the strains they carry usually don’t kill them. If they are dying, it is likely because they are picking up new strains, which have evolved in domestically farmed populations. Another likely means of dissemination for the viruses we fear most is through the trucking of domestic and exotic birds around various continents—in other words, by people.
Some methods of spread are very culture-specific. In Thailand, fighting cocks are highly valued, reminding us of the origins of these birds as fighters. At matches, those betting money may go around and blow into the beaks of the contenders to check for lung capacity. Owners may suck mucus out through the beak between rounds. Traveling from match to match around the countryside, combined with this intimate contact, makes the fighting circuit a prime means of spreading the disease.
In October 2004, a Thai man flew into the Brussels airport from Bangkok with two crested hawk-eagles (Spizaetus nipalensis) in his hand luggage. He told customs officers they were for a friend. The birds, wrapped in cloth, stuffed into wicker tubes, and kept in the bag with the zipper left partly open for air, seemed healthy. They were “humanely sacrificed” (a very appropriate use of the term, since they gave their lives for the perceived greater good), and scientists looked for Newcastle disease and avian influenza. They found not only influenza but also the H5N1 strain that everyone feared. This kind of illegal trade is a huge business and a marvelous opportunity for all kinds of bacteria and viruses to find new homes in new lands.
Millions of tons of biological material—human food, animal feeds, meat-and-bone meal (MBM, which is basically animal offal reinvented as fertilizer in Indonesia, supplements for cats in America, and a variety of other essentials of modern life)—circle the globe annually. Economically, this circulation is described as free trade. Scientifically, it is simply carrying various types of living and non-living things from their ecological homes, where they usually cause few problems, to new areas, where they are very likely to cause a lot of problems. MBM was a major vehicle for transmitting bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) within and between countries. One might be curious to know whether those who carefully crafted the documents of the World Trade Organization considered this possibility. One might wonder how many of them had some rudimentary knowledge of biology or even knew where food came from.
The farmers of Southeast Asia didn’t scale up their production and increase the volume and speed of their trade in poultry products just “because”; they were responding to market demands for low-cost animal food. They are making a living by providing the protein and other nutrients that are necessary to sustain urban life; those farmers are, in a real sense, an essential part of the urban ecosystem. Without rapid economic growth and urbanization, avian influenza would likely remain a minor problem.
According to the United Nations, one in three people lived in a city in 1960. By the end of the twentieth century, almost half of all people did; by 2030, more than 60 percent of the population is expected to live in cities. Many of these megacities are in the developing world, especially in South and eastern Asia. These urban people want to eat, and they want protein. Chicken, ducks, geese, and pigs, all grown on an industrial model, will do just fine. Brazil, the United States, China, and the European Union are the world’s biggest poultry producers. China leads the world in ducks and geese. Not surprisingly, other countries in the region—Thailand in particular—wanted to take advantage of these expanding urban markets and jumped into the hot economic fray. In places such as Thailand and Indonesia, increased production has sometimes been achieved by taking the kinds of laid-back, no-input chicken rearing I saw in the 1980s and scaling it up. If some chickens and ducks, mixed with rice paddies and fish ponds, are good, why aren’t more better? Not surprisingly, the current epidemic of avian influenza started in south China and has spread outward from there.
Still, the temptation to blame the wild birds, and not our own hubris, is strong.
When H5N1 appeared in Russia, rumors circulated that hunters were offering to shoot ducks to prevent the spread of the disease. Westerners laughed at this primitive response.
In October 2005, when cases of H5N1 influenza started appearing in Europe, British hunters stood at the ready, assured that shooting ducks was no mere macho hobby but an act of national public health importance, a serious form of scientific surveillance.
That same month, George W. Bush, the president of the United States, gave the only response he seemed capable of imagining, saying he would rally the armed forces to fight the dreaded bird flu.
People who study viruses have pointed out that the H5 type of influenza virus found in China and a highly pathogenic H5N1 isolated from poultry in Scotland in 1959 share a common ancestor. Because influenza viruses are constantly drifting (small changes) and shifting (large, abrupt changes), the currently circulating strains are different from those first isolated. However, it would be disingenuous to suggest that intensification and global genetic “homogenization” of poultry production have not been driving forces in a variety of epidemics, including this one.
Some pontificators have suggested that farmers in South and eastern Asia should raise chickens the way we do in North America and Europe—inside tightly controlled buildings. These people have never lived in poor countries in the humid tropics, nor do they understand the systemic ramifications of creating a few large farms where once there were many small ones. If they want bio-security such as we have in Europe and North America, the tropical farmers will need to close off the barns. But in the tropics, without air conditioning, the birds will start to die within minutes. With what power source would they air-condition? And what would happen to all those poor farmers in the countryside who depend on small flocks of poultry for food and to pay their school and medical bills? In the 1980s, when we marveled at the man with the white flag and his ducks, the village chickens, and the wonder of the wild jungle fowl, were we off base? I think not. We’ve learned some things since then, and one of them, surely, must have something to do with the bewildering complexity of the world we live in.
In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, an unprecedented global scientific effort to assess the world’s ecosystems, demonstrated all the services that intact ecosystems provide for us—air, water, food, meaningful work—and just how vulnerable we all now are, with water and soils and forests and oceans at or near tipping points. No, if we want to find a solution to the influenza problem, more of the same won’t cut it. Even if we kill all the sick chickens and put the rest into air-conditioned hotels, there will still be ducks flying overhead or cats or ferrets slinking in and out of the shrubbery. Some of the largest outbreaks of avian influenza have been in some of the best-managed poultry operations in the world, in some of the wealthiest countries. The viruses, like all microbes, adapt quickly to new situations. Already in late 2006, a new variation of the H5N1 avian influenza virus had emerged in China, possibly in response to selection pressures from vaccines given to chickens. By 2016, human cases of H5N6, H7N9, and H9N2 were reported.
People in cities need food, but they need to be educated about where food comes from and the real costs of producing, processing, and shipping it. The energy costs of commercial chicken production, for instance, cannot be simply reduced to intake over output and then compared to cows, as is sometimes done. In this context, chicken always appears more efficient than other animal meats. But how much energy is required for the buildings and machinery, for growing special feeds, for getting the feed to the farm and the chickens to market? If the small farmers lose chickens as a source of livelihood, how will they pay for education and health care? All of these are real costs, which someone is paying.
Knowledge of the social and ecological dimensions of food should be part of every food consumer’s education. An inability to shop for food, prepare meals, and talk intelligently about where that food comes from should be grounds for dismissal of politicians and corporate heads. In the years following the initial outbreaks of avian influenza, I spent a lot of time and energy working with policymakers in Canada, looking at how to prevent the disease from entering North America, and farmers in Southeast Asia, looking for ways to stop the epidemic at the source. Many officials and corporate leaders were encouraging countries to follow a program of test-and-slaughter, and of discouraging villagers from raising free-run village chickens. In March of 2008, at a market in eastern Thailand, I discovered that if sellers were responding to economic incentives, the programs designed to stop people from raising backyard chickens were unlikely to succeed. According to a woman with a dozen gutted and cleaned birds in front of her, village chicken was going for about twice as much on a per-weight basis as the commercially-reared broilers.
Many of those who were successfully lured into subcontracts with large commercial firms were men. This repeated a pattern often seen in the history of economic development: when an activity is for home subsistence (backyard chickens, egg money, home-reared crickets) the women are in charge. As soon as there are economic returns in the market place (industrial farming, competitive roosters) the men take over. Every solution to feeding the world and preventing pandemics has stumbled into this bramble of patriarchy and, in “solving” the original problem, creates many others. Every food security and pandemic prevention initiative, if it does not address the issue of gender relations, is, or will be, a failure in enabling sustainable human well-being.
The next month, at the invitation of my Indonesian co-workers, my wife and I visited a Javanese village in an area reported to be highly endemic for avian influenza. Nevertheless, villagers who attended our workshop claimed to have had no confirmed cases of bird flu. Birds had died of other causes, of course, and the carcasses were “safely” disposed of in a nearby river.
After the meeting, the villagers took us to see their chickens. Their greatest source of pride were their Ayam Pelung—competitive singing roosters. They were tall—about three feet high—and their calls were long, drawn out, low voiced, reminding me of Cesária Évora, the “barefoot diva” of Cape Verde. These singing roosters were each worth US$2,000 to $3,000, which was more than the annual income of most of these farmers. Before avian influenza hit the headlines, the roosters were taken to competitions throughout the country, and beyond. Winners could take in $500 in a single show. One of the farmers was a breeder who had sold roosters to buyers from as far away as Japan. A program that relied on slaughtering chickens that tested positive, and paying compensation at market rates for commercial broilers, was a non-starter for these villagers. Of course, they had no bird flu. Of course, any birds that died had succumbed to some other disease. Those who were designing global programs to eradicate avian influenza may have imagined that a chicken was “just” a chicken, but this was clearly not the case.
I remembered, then, seeing the roosters in competition back in 1986, in cages, high up on swaying poles, judges moving from bird to bird, listening. I do not know what criteria the judges used, but standing there in the slight cool of a shady tropical morning, hearing those fado-like songs of love and loss, I could understand, like the Zoroastrians, how the calls of those jungle fowl might drive away the devils of darkness.