Bird Flu Excersise is an election photo-op

Tomorrow in the Kilmeedy area of County Limerick, an excersise is to take place to see how well we are prepared for an outbreak of bird flu. (see front page of today’s Irish Times)

A total of 6,000 chickens, which the Department of Agriculture claim are past their productive lives, will be slaughtered when CO2 gas will be pumped into their poultry sheds.

But is this nothing more than a photo op, designed to make us believe that our government is actually doing something to protect us from the dreaded birs flu?

I dont recall the Department of Agriculture slaughteringg thousands of animals to see if they were prepared for foot and mouth. I guess there would be uproar if they herded hundreds of cattle into a shed and slaughterd them knowing that they were perfectly healthy, and were not going to be put into the food chain.

The truth of the matter is that killing thousands of healthy chickens is not going to prove anything. We know we can kill large numbers of animals, we did it during foot and mouth. We know that CO2 will kill chickens, it can kill us.

It would have made the government look better if these 6,000 chickens were donated to the people living in the horn of Africa to help relieve some of the food shortages there. This whole thing is nothing more than a photo-op. A very wasteful one at that. It is not even going to involve all those who would take part in a real cull. Fire services, who will be responsible to enter the poultry sheds to check CO2 levels after a real cull, are not taking part in this excersise