It was a concerted effort that netted a winning result. The Humane Society of the United States, Mercy for Animals, and Farm Sanctuary successfully settled a lawsuit challenging the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) avian influenza response plan. USDA’s cruel and irresponsible plan relies on and incentivizes “depopulation” (the mass slaughter of innocent animals) to contain bird flu outbreaks rather than doing anything to address the stressful and overcrowded factory farm conditions that make such outbreaks virtually inevitable. 

The USDA sought to dismiss the lawsuit, but a California federal judge ordered in March 2021 that the case should move forward, and ultimately, the parties were able to reach a settlement. While this victory will not immediately stop the mass killings of birds on factory farms or prevent the agency from spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars bailing out agribusiness when flocks are “depopulated,” it will require USDA to produce an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) addressing the devastating impacts of a plan that involves killing millions of birds and disposing of their bodies in unlined pits or burning them.

We hope the agency will realize the foolishness of its plan and adopt an alternative that seeks to prevent bird flu outbreaks in the first place by addressing the horrendous overcrowded conditions in factory farms, as suggested in our lawsuit. Adopting such an alternative could stop the senseless killing of tens of millions of animals and save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

The agency’s response to a 2015 bird flu outbreak, for example, cost the lives of 50 million turkeys and chickens, and cost taxpayers an alarming $850 million. The 2022 outbreak of avian influenza cases has now spread to 40 states, and the USDA recently announced it is devoting another $400 million in public funds to its bird flu response. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attests that 3-in-4 new infectious diseases in people are zoonotic and originated in other animals. The USDA has acknowledged that overcrowding animals can lead to increased transmission of zoonotic diseases like avian influenza, and lists herd reduction as a best management practice. Yet they have made no sincere attempt to encourage agribusiness to reduce their flock sizes. In fact, the United States government incentivizes animal overcrowding by subsidizing factory farms and giving them financial bailouts when disease strikes and animals are killed en masse. Farm Sanctuary and its coalition partners are determined to see the USDA implement anti-confinement incentives like those proposed in the lawsuit. 

There’s still a lot of work to be done, and you can help. Please urge the USDA to stop depopulation incentives and reassign these resources to facilitate food-system-wide sustainability and justice measures. Factory farms subject animals to immense suffering, wreak havoc on local communities and the environment, and are a breeding ground for disease.  

We will continue this effort and are grateful to the Humane Society of the United States for initiating this lawsuit, and to our co-plaintiff, Mercy For Animals, and the pro bono counsel at Shearman & Sterling, LLP, which represented us in the lawsuit.