Has it also been affecting the price of chicken? I know that egg prices were a sticking point from the election so there’s a focus on that, but if it’s an avian flu that’s affecting chickens, would that also cause the price of any chicken product to go up? I feel like I haven’t heard anything around meat prices going up.
I was trying to find some Cornish hens at Walmart today - no luck, but the chicken prices in general didn’t seem higher.
I wonder if it could be related to the difference between the way broiler versus layers are treated and kept. I think a broiler you usually kill after three months - they’re bred to get huge fast, and their bodies will literally fall apart if you allow them to live too long. (Volunteered for a while at a vegan rescue that took in chickens that fell off trucks, etc - they’d end up losing lots of feathers and looked terrible as they got older).
Layers I think are going to be kept in the conditions most conducive to spreading disease. You’re not killing them quickly, you’re trying to cram as many in a tiny space and keeping them alive as long as they’ll continue laying.
TL;DR: I suspect that we kill off the chickens we eat too fast for the disease to spread.
I think this is the answer. It can take a hen several months to start laying; meat chickens are typically harvested in six to twelve weeks.
I’ve heard a few similar theories.
Not only do meat-varieties have shorter life than egg-varieties (I think egg-varieties take longer to lay their first egg than meat-varieties get total), but there are also many more egg-layers at each facility.
Also, the locations of the facilities relative to migration routes or windstreams may be playing a role. I’ve heard the egg facilities are more concentrated around migration routes, so they’re more likely to get contaminated.
It’s a good question / interesting topic - but a terrible situation otherwise from non-academic standpoints
What humanity has done to chickens is pretty messed up honestly.
https://www.farmtransparency.org/kb/food/abattoirs/age-animals-slaughtered
One factor here is that they typically kill egg laying hens a little bit later than they do for broiler chickens. They typically do so once they are 18 months old (since egg laying rates declines and they are then seen as waste). This is in comparison to broiler chickens who are slaughtered even younger at just 5-7 weeks old. Faster to bring back the broiler population after killing all of them due to disease if you were going to kill them in a few weeks regardless of disease
Chicken prices have gone up slightly, but not nearly to the same degree as eggs.
Edit: for reference, I used to get chicken thighs for $1.29/lbs. and this weekend they were $1.79/lbs.
CostCo has frozen skinless boneless breasts at $2.80/lbs. for whatever that’s worth. Notable while I was there, but not really germaine to the topic, while red meat prices seem to have also gone up steadily over the years with even 80% lean ground beef costing close to $4-$5/lbs., they had frozen goat cubes for $4.60/lbs. if you bought 15 lbs.
Same reason eggs went up in price: corporate greed. At the end of 2022, there were more than 300 million egg laying hens in America. 20 million were recently culled due to bird flu, and egg prices quadrupled. You do the math.