Stop Ventilation Shutdown! with Dr Crystal Heath

[00:00:05] Jasmin Singer: I'm so happy you're back. I know that it's a really difficult subject, but you somehow, while informing about really heavy things, you somehow also, I think, really exude hope and action. And I always feel emboldened when I look at your work. So thank you for sharing that once again, with Our Hen House listeners and with me.

Now, unfortunately, the topic that you're here to discuss is a distressing one, but it's something we all need to be aware of. So, first of all, get us up to date on avian influenza. I feel like we're no longer talking about ending this epidemic, but like, I don't know, just including it as part of the business plan? Am I right?

[00:00:47] Crystal Heath: You know, I always think, okay, it's over, it's done, but it keeps happening, like there keeps being more outbreaks. Now we're up to 82 million birds who've been killed since 2022. On February 12th, there was another big outbreak. It's amazing how it just keeps going.

There's talk of vaccinating for it, but these depopulations keep happening. And the worst part about it is nobody is talking about the really cruel methods of killing. Ventilation shutdown is becoming more and more frequent and it seems like there's no motivation by the industry to put plans in place to use less brutal methods.

In fact, it seems like they want to just keep using the most cruelest methods, ventilation shutdown, mass killing of animals via heat stroke. I hope we can raise awareness about this so that people know what's going on and we can do something to change it.

[00:01:43] Jasmin Singer: Yeah, no kidding. It's really mind blowing, honestly. Tell us about ventilation shutdown, plus how and where it's being used. There's no need to get into horrifying detail, but I am curious about it for our listeners.

[00:02:00] Crystal Heath: Yeah. I mean, if you're not familiar, so when there's an avian influenza outbreak, they "need" to kill all of the animals, whether they're infected or not, on the facility just to prevent the spread of this to other birds in the area. So when you have a giant facility like this, there's no great way to do it.

There's AVMA preferred methods, which are suffocating them in firefighting foam or sealing up barns and pumping in carbon dioxide gas until they suffocate. These are preferred methods. There's also breaking their necks, horrible. But the worst of all is sealing up the barns and then pumping in heat and waiting for the birds to die after many hours.

And this is a method that's used in the biggest facilities because they can't get enough foam quickly enough, they can't get enough carbon dioxide, and so they've resorted to doing this and allowing this. And of course, the American Veterinary Medical Association allows this in so called constrained circumstances, not really describing what that exactly means.

And here we are today where this has become pretty much industry standard. Now there's this push to make it a preferred method so that they don't have to fill out all the paperwork. And really all that the AVMA does in allowing this as a method to be used in constrained circumstances is this allows producers to get bailout money when they have to resort to killing their animals this way.

So there's no incentive to put plans in place to use less cruel methods and you know, 2, 000 of us veterinarians have signed on to push the AVMA to reclassify this as a not recommended method. The AVMA has denied our petition. They voted to turn the question back to the panel on depopulation.

That was three years ago. Nothing has happened. They've since changed their House of Delegates manual so our petitions can't go forward, so that similar petitions can't be allowed. They raised the number of petitioners from 50 to 200. They're putting all of these barriers in our path. We were denied entry to the AVMA's Humane Endings Symposium.

The AVMA leaders even sort of alluded to the media that we would be a threat, like our presence would threaten the safety of these people. Which I'm still a member, but it's just kind of mind numbing, it's mind boggling how this has happened but I think, you know, the more this sort of thing keeps happening and we keep showing all of the barriers to change, I think people are getting frustrated and I think there's more and more stories coming out about this. More journalists are interested in writing about this. I was hoping a big story would come out today and we could talk about it but I guess it's going to maybe come out tomorrow or next week, but that'll be exciting so look out for that.

[00:05:08] Jasmin Singer: Well, send it to us and we'll put it in the show notes for this episode. So, I feel like this used to be an emergency type of thing, but is it just becoming standard practice? Am I right?

[00:05:21] Crystal Heath: It used to be a method to be used in constrained circumstances only, but it's become more and more common. Like back in the day in 2015 when we first had this big massive avian influenza outbreak, ventilation shutdown was only used a few times. And that's because we had several contractors who could use foam and other preferred methods, which still aren't great, but it's not as bad as being heated to death over several hours, but now they're down to one contractor they can use and they haven't stockpiled the equipment necessary.

Producers have no incentive to put plans in place to use less cruel methods. In Italy and the Netherlands, these countries took ventilation shutdown off the table. It's not allowed in those countries, because it's so cruel, but here in the United States, we let it happen. In Italy, in the Netherlands, they use nitrogen gas, which we've all heard horrible things about nitrogen gas lately because of the death penalty and how that was used there.

But it's still better than heating animals to death. Really, there's no, no great way to do this, but this is the worst way to go about doing this.

[00:06:35] Jasmin Singer: And I know that that has been used to kill both pigs and poultry, but I don't know which it started with. Can you tell us about that history?

[00:06:45] Crystal Heath: It started with birds back in, you know, the 2015 2016 times. This is the first avian influenza outbreak. But really, it kind of came to our attention in 2020 with the COVID 19 slaughterhouse bottlenecks. And that's when it first came to the public's attention, with the footage that Matt Johnson took of Iowa Select Farms using this on their pigs, when this wasn't even an infectious disease outbreak situation at all.

This was just a producer who didn't put any plans in place for any sort of slowdown of the supply chain and pigs were quickly outgrowing their pens. And so they resorted to using this method to kill healthy pigs who did not pose any sort of infectious disease risk.

Then, with this now avian Influenza Outbreak, we're finding more and more birds are being killed using this method and it's just kind of becoming normal and nobody except me, I think, is really raising any concerns about this. It's particularly disturbing how the veterinary profession as a whole isn't really talking about it except for our little group, Our Honor, and Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shut Down.

[00:08:07] Jasmin Singer: So we started talking a little bit about the AVMA. How does the AVMA's position help out industry?

[00:08:14] Crystal Heath: So they created their guidelines for depopulation, and this was a collaborative agreement that they made with the United States Department of Agriculture. So the USDA looks to the AVMA guidelines to set policy and indemnity payments to producers when their animals are killed following the AVMA guidelines.

And it's not necessarily that producers are killing their animals. Sometimes they are, and then they're reimbursed, but sometimes it's state or federal officials who come in and handle the depopulations and they follow the guidelines for how to go about doing this. And they pretty much, you know, rubber stamp ventilation shut down when they can't get the foam fast enough, or they run out of foam.

And this means that producers get. millions of dollars in bailout money when their birds get infected and they have to resort to some of these really cruel methods of killing. Just as an example, Genio Turkey Store got more than 85 million dollars in bailout money. Tyson got more than 29 million dollars in bailout money.

And so we're talking overall, we've spent as taxpayers more than one billion dollars on this and to kill these, these animals in absolutely cruel, horrible ways.

[00:09:41] Jasmin Singer: What about cruelty laws? Like how do they relate to this practice? And is there any way they can be used here?

[00:09:48] Crystal Heath: This is an interesting thing because in Minnesota, they specifically say that you have to provide your animals with fresh circulating air. So clearly this is in violation of animal cruelty laws. And we have seen documents, we've seen emails from the National Pork Board, the National Pork Producers Council, when they were discussing this.

When they were grappling with having to use ventilation shutdown in 2020 and they're like, This is in violation of cruelty laws. What are we gonna do? It's kind of nice when the AVMA legitimizes it, oh, veterinary improved methods, right? This is now industry standard practice.

Well, how do things become industry standard in the first place? It's because my profession legitimizes it. We legitimize confining mother pigs in gestation crates and cutting off the beaks of birds and cutting off tails with no anesthesia and castrating with no anesthesia. That's how things become industry standard and I'm saying we probably shouldn't just be allowing these things to be industry standard anymore.

But I do think, maybe in a few weeks or months we'll start to hear from our friends, our attorney friends who might be looking at addressing some of the animal cruelty issues in various states where they have these laws and kind of challenging this. So that'll be exciting.

[00:11:14] Jasmin Singer: Yeah, I'm very curious about that. I know I've seen the industry refer to this as euthanasia. Is that how they sell it?

[00:11:21] Crystal Heath: It's so frustrating when I constantly hear and see it written in the media and in newspapers calling it euthanasia when this is not euthanasia. At best, we can call it depopulation, but it is mass killing of animals. Many of these animals are healthy. The term euthanasia is a term that should be reserved for the ending of the life of one who is suffering in a humane way.

And this is by no means humane, and we are not ending the lives of animals who are suffering in the most part. Yes. When a bird is infected with avian influenza, most of them do die. And we don't want them to suffer a prolonged death. But the vast majority of birds we're killing in this outbreak are not infected with avian influenza, they just are living near birds who are infected.

That's what we need to be discussing. We shouldn't be using these euphemisms. My next plan is to sort of send out an advisory to all journalists on how to talk about this issue. This is a great idea I came across from the book, Let the Record Show, about ACT UP.

When the AIDS crisis hit, what ACT UP did was they sent out posters to all newspapers around the country, informing them how to talk about AIDS in a way that wasn't biased. This is what we need to do with these sorts of issues, with these animal issues and these out outbreaks.

We need to inform journalists ahead of time what questions they need to ask, how to refer to these and not just resort to the way that the industry wants them to talk about this. Calling it euthanasia, talking about, oh, the poor producers who are losing money when really they're taking so much of our money, and they're not poor producers, the CEO of Hormel, which is the parent company of Jennie O, made more than six million dollars. Donnie King, the CEO of Tyson, made 13 million while his company was getting 29 million of our taxpayer money.

So we can't be talking about the poor producers here.

[00:13:32] Jasmin Singer: I love that you brought up ACT UP because I bring it up so much as it relates to animal advocacy and this is a completely different way that I've ever heard it talked about. I mean, obviously, because it's a very specific thing we're dealing with here, but there's so much insight to be gleaned from ACT UP and the success of ACT UP.

And I mean, obviously AIDS was such a horrible crisis, especially a crisis of conscience relating to how we dealt with it. I was a little child, so I won't take responsibility, but how our society dealt with dealing with people who had AIDS. And if you think about kind of how quickly that changed, relatively speaking, it took way too long, but now it's like, I bet young people today would be absolutely floored if they had any idea how we were treating people with AIDS, especially gay men. And I'm curious. I wonder if that will be the case in a couple of decades. I mean, which is also way too goddamn long here, but maybe it'll be the case with situations like this. What do you think?

[00:14:38] Crystal Heath: I think things are going to change really fast. I mean, as hard as it is, like we were talking about this a couple of years ago and it's like, oh, and ventilation shutdown is now so much worse. And we've killed so many more animals this way. But I think we've gotten more ideas now on how we're going to go about this and how we're going to approach the veterinary profession.

And more and more veterinarians are coming and joining Our Honor and are taking action and changing things and talking about these things. So when we talk about ACT UP, we always think about, you know, the outrageous actions. But there are a lot of people who very much kind of like me, I'm kind of introverted.

I like to read a lot and write a lot and study these things. And there were a lot of people just like me involved who were doing things, you know, on the inside professionally. And there were a lot of, you know, doctors and this is what I feel like my role is. I'm like the professional person on the inside trying to change things, you know, teaching the veterinary profession about the history.

Like, if we can teach the veterinary profession about ACT UP and how things happen, and how change happens, and realize we don't have to just accept this as an unchangeable fact that we just have to be a part of. We can actually drastically change things. And we have to show the way our food system, the way we produce food, has drastically changed over the years.

Our diets have drastically changed from eating 50 pounds of meat per year in 1960 to now over 200 pounds of meat per year here in 2020. So the meat industry drastically changed our diets and we can change it back to something a little bit healthier that doesn't involve the mass killing of animals at the behest of the veterinary profession, with us legitimizing it, we can be a profession that protects animals and protects all life on earth, and our environment and wildlife and also feeds our growing population of humans as well.

[00:16:42] Jasmin Singer: That is absolutely true. It's like bananas to hear about all of this. And I know that as you mentioned, you know more about the in house politics at the AVMA than anyone would ever want to. I'm curious if there's any pushback from the rank and file.

[00:16:59] Crystal Heath: Yes, and I think they're really coming to terms with how out of step they are, not only with their own profession, like it's just really a few people at the top of the AVMA who are controlling things. And those people obviously have interests that are aligned with the industry. They want to make sure that the Tysons, the Cargills, make their money.

They talk about their stakeholders, and I think most people aren't aware that the AVMA isn't really about advancing the veterinary profession so much as advancing the interests of their stakeholders, these very large corporations, pharmaceutical companies, and animal agriculture companies.

And I think a lot of people don't realize that the pharmaceutical industry and the animal agriculture industry are very much interconnected. Because if the animal agriculture industry was to decrease the number of animals that they produce per year, that would affect the profits of the pharmaceutical industry who sells antibiotics, vaccines, and other medications to those animals. I'm sure they're, they're hoping for a big boost by selling avian influenza vaccines to all of these birds. So the threat of scaling down animal agriculture is one that could threaten a lot of people, well, a lot of the very wealthy people, I should say. It would be a benefit for the vast majority of the rest of us who are at risk from getting, you know, all of the various pandemic diseases that might come about because of this ongoing arms race that we have with nature, the way that we're doing this.

But yeah, The AVMA is very much about protecting the interests of the industry and it's really just a small group of people at the top. The sad part is most veterinarians are so busy with their day to day lives, their practices, helping their patients, that they don't have time to deal with these bigger issues.

But the number of us who are passionate about this definitely outnumbers the number of people who work in food animal medicine and who work for the industry. So I think our voices are much more passionate. So I think change is going to happen very rapidly once we get mobilized.

[00:19:22] Jasmin Singer: Well, that's good to hear, because this is really sad. I mean, this is horribly sad. But there are also dramatic implications for wildlife, right?

[00:19:32] Crystal Heath: Absolutly and we've seen that with this avian influenza outbreak, we've seen bears are getting sick. We've seen seals and sea lions are dying. Penguins. And it's tragic. And it's also scary. I think a lot of the wildlife officials' plans are now to control wildlife around factory farms.

And that's the scary part. There's some good things. They're thinking about using lasers to deter animals from factory farms, but the biggest concern is, are they going to start killing birds and killing wildlife around factory farms to keep them away? In one case, there was a producer who went hunting, duck hunting, fed the entrails of his dead ducks that he killed to his flock.

This was in Minnesota, resulting in a big avian influenza outbreak.

[00:20:28] Jasmin Singer: Wow.

[00:20:28] Crystal Heath: How often is that sort of thing happening, I wonder?

[00:20:32] Jasmin Singer: I wonder too, and I mean, speaking of that, in addition to being spread by wild birds, how else is it spread?

[00:20:38] Crystal Heath: It can be spread by a variety of different ways, from trucks, feed trucks coming in, other contractors coming into a farm from other facilities, and you think about, if you've ever lived near a poultry facility, there are feathers that are blown miles away from the facility. And as trucks, you know, go down the road full of birds headed to the slaughterhouse, feathers are just everywhere.

Each of those feathers can carry avian influenza and even just the particles of shavings, tiny little particles of shavings that are blown out. You know, these big buildings, they have these massive fans all along the sides and they blow out all of this air and shavings and feathers, that all carries avian influenza and that goes in the air and can go to infect other facilities.

Now, it seems like that's happening less than it did in 2015, and usually it's just a pinpoint infection, mostly from wildlife, but that's always a risk too, of it spreading from just people, workers, trucks, those sorts of things.

[00:21:46] Jasmin Singer: And one of the uses that the industry makes of avian influenza is to claim that investigators, like those from DXE, are at risk of spreading it. So, what is your response to that claim?

[00:21:59] Crystal Heath: That claim is outrageous because I know how seriously they take infectious disease risks because that would be devastating to animal rights activists if they would cause some sort of outbreak in these facilities. And they don't want to see animals get sick, obviously. They care very much about the lives of these animals.

And it would risk the sanctuaries too, that these animals go to. So I know that they use really good biosecurity protocols, full gowns, booties, showering, cleaning everything really well before they go in. So I thought that was outrageous and really I could not believe that a veterinarian would say in the media, make this wild claim, and then that was just published.

But it was great to show just how outrageous rumors by a professional can get spread around and even published in the media. I'm really thankful for that journalist, Phil Barber of the Press Democrat, for publishing that quote from that veterinarian out of UC Davis.

And here's another, like, really important thing I think people need to do more, when that journalist did that and he wrote that quote, I reached out to him and I just was like, Hey, I just want to share some information with you. And I shared some scientific studies about how ducks can have avian influenza and not show any signs of it. And it's like, was that maybe the case with Reichardt Duck Farm?

I know there's a lot of wildlife around that facility and a lot of small duck farms and just started a dialogue with them that was very friendly, like not judgmental, and I started just asking questions like, hey, do you know how they depopulated? This is some FOIA documents that I've gotten.

And he started asking his own questions, getting his own FOIAs, and then he wrote this great article exposing how this producer, Mike Weber of Weber Family Farms, ended up using ventilation shutdown on his high welfare, egg free, humane farm. And that was a great story, and he really did this deep dive into ventilation shutdown and exactly what the birds experienced and how much in bailout money he got, and if we could educate more journalists like that, and get everybody who's writing about this to really go in depth and talk about these things and the bailout money and how birds are killed, that could be a huge game changer.

So I hope more activists do that sort of thing and start friendly dialogues instead of just sending hate mail to people who aren't telling the story right.

[00:24:36] Jasmin Singer: Such a good point, too, just in general for advocacy efforts. And what do you see as the future here? Like, can this ever be contained? Or is avian influenza just going to be a cost of doing business? Is this the new normal?

[00:24:50] Crystal Heath: What's the next thing is what I'm worried about. If we get this under control, there will be something else. And influenza viruses, we know, mutate quite readily. There's going to be a worse influenza virus. We thought 2015 was bad. Now this outbreak is even worse. What's it going to be in a few years from now?

Or even next year? When we have massive amounts of animals, genetically similar animals, in close contact with human workers, we are just creating the perfect environment to create the next virus, the next outbreak, and it could even jump to human beings and cause the next pandemic. And this is the situation we get into when we have this slaughter based food production practice, where we're killing large numbers of animals and producing protein based on a small number of species.

When we have the technology to not do this, it's like, why are we continuing to expand and raise more and more animals and kill more and more animals when we're running out of land, we don't have the labor to grow the crops to feed them. It's only a matter of time till something so much worse than this avian influenza outbreak happens.

So yeah, I'm not hopeful for this being over. It's only just the beginning, I think.

[00:26:13] Jasmin Singer: Well, That's... no, it's okay. It's good to know what we're dealing with. How are they keeping prices down in the light of such losses?

[00:26:22] Crystal Heath: Well, I mean, taxpayers are paying for keeping prices down. Our money is going to keep prices down, but also going in the pockets of these wealthy CEOs who continue to make millions and millions of dollars, producing food this way. It's just all subsidized. It's a fake system.

We really need to do something about this and stop incentivizing these production methods because this is just not gonna work long term. This is not how we're gonna feed our planet and maintain a healthy planet by any means.

[00:26:52] Jasmin Singer: Totally. Is there anything else Our Honor has been doing to fight this that we haven't covered?

[00:26:58] Crystal Heath: Oh gosh, well, I think educating the next generation of vet students. Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shutdown is still very much a thing too, and that's kind of a side project of Our Honor, and now, Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shutdown, which is sort of the less radical arm of Our Honor, is asking for producers to sign a pledge to promise to not kill their animals en masse via heat stroke.

Not a very aggressive ask, by any means. Has any producer actually signed on yet? No, and that's curious. So if you are a producer and you want to promise not to kill your animals in a massive heat stroke, please, sign on to vavsc. org.

[00:27:41] Jasmin Singer: I doubt they listen. I don't, I feel like that's not the Our Hen House demographic, but you know, I could be completely wrong.

[00:27:48] Crystal Heath: I feel like people at the Animal Ag Alliance probably listen to you all the time.

[00:27:52] Jasmin Singer: When you're on.

[00:27:54] Crystal Heath: You know, reading all these FOIA documents and everything, we see how groups like the Animal Ag Alliance are constantly sending emails to police, to the FBI, to the Departments of Agriculture, the state vets, warning them about scary animal rights activists.

And I think we need to do that. We need to send emails to these groups and ag departments and warn them about the threats of pandemics and share with them some scientific papers that have come out. There's a great one that recently came out about ventilation shutdown, sort of going into the history of it and the systems that led to it becoming a normalized thing. It was Martin Snell and, I'm forgetting the other person, but that's a great paper we should be sending around. Dr. Gwendy Reyes Illg and Indu Mani, published a great paper about the rise of heat stroke based killing. And these are things we need to be sharing with these ag departments and telling them about these harms, and they should know how much of their taxpayer dollars are going to support these wealthy producers, bailing them out for this, and do they really want to be a part of this system?

[00:29:01] Jasmin Singer: Well, are there any other issues aside from ventilation shutdown that we need to get up to date on before you go?

[00:29:08] Crystal Heath: We got a lot. We got terminal surgeries in vet schools, still very much a thing. We are gonna be having an paper coming out pretty soon about how many animals are killed in veterinary schools, which veterinary schools still kill animals in student training, which I think is a question everybody is dying to know and has been asking me for a long time.

We also are addressing Miami Seaquarium, which we know many former veterinary staff, maybe current staff, maybe recently fired staff, who are voicing concerns about Miami Seaquarium. You know, they all went in working at this facility because they wanted to help the animals and they thought, okay, we know Miami Seaquarium is a problem.

People have been protesting them for 20 years. So we're going to go in there and try to make things better. And then they realized they couldn't make things better because the executives are retaliating against people who voice concerns, wanting people to stay silent, wanting people not to report things to the USDA, firing those who speak up.

And so we wrote a letter to the mayor, the commissioners, the police, and the state attorney. I went to Miami Seaquarium and documented the things that I saw that were concerning. Took footage, took videos. We wrote up a statement. We got now more than 70 veterinarians have read the statement and signed on agreeing with our determinations on these things.

And I'm going there today. This will be published in a month, so we'll see what happens as a result of me going there, and hopefully we can shut this place down because it's very clear there's no making this place better. It needs to end. This can be the one that starts the ball rolling for hopefully ending the confinement of these captive animals for entertainment.

[00:30:59] Jasmin Singer: Definitely. Yes. There's so much that you're doing that I know our listeners will want to support. So can you tell us how they can support your efforts and how we can follow you online?

[00:31:11] Crystal Heath: Check us out at ourhonor.org is our website. Sign up for a newsletter. I'm on Twitter, mostly, like if you want to follow me and what I'm thinking about every day, follow my personal Twitter, Dr. Crystal Heath, and you can also follow Our Honor on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok, and then also Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shutdown, VAVSD.Org.

Another project we have is the Pig Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers. That's something that there's going to be a lot more attention on with some things coming out. So, humaneslaughter.org is our website for that. And, there'll be a new paper coming out. I know there's also a movie Joey Carbstrong's doing, that features one of Our Honor vets, Alice Brough, in it.

So that'll be really exciting. So yeah, please follow us. And, join us and support us, and we accept non veterinarians help, so we always need volunteers, so please help us.

[00:32:12] Jasmin Singer: Thank you so much, Crystal, for everything that you're doing and for sharing all of this incredible insight and, you know, very difficult information. But like I said at the beginning, it's, it's so motivating to know that there are people like you who are working to change this and that there are inroads for people like me and our listeners to also help out.

So we really appreciate you.

[00:32:36] Crystal Heath: Absolutely, and I appreciate you and Our Hen House, for giving us a platform and letting us share our stories and talking about them.