Avian flu: a new video from the L214 association denounces the massive burial of birds in Vendée

As an avian flu epidemic hits poultry farms in western France, the animal defense association L214 broadcasts frightening images of the burial of "millions of farmed birds in a requisitioned pit by the State on a motorway worksite in the Vendée".

According to L214, these images filmed by a drone on a construction site near Petosse, along the departmental road 949 linking Fontenay-le-Comte to Luçon, show “heaps of chicken corpses spread out with a shovel and covered with lime dispersed by kinds of snow cannons.

“Since the beginning of the avian plague epidemic (improperly called avian flu), nearly 20 million farmed birds have been killed by asphyxiation.

The extent of the disaster is such that the State is overwhelmed by the volume of corpses and asks the breeders to improvise pits or else requisitions burial sites, like the one in Petosse here", explains the association in the press release that accompanies the images.

“Human barbarism has reached its climax”

For Sébastien Arsac, co-founder of L214: “Human barbarism towards animals has reached its climax.

The slaughter of farmed birds is so massive that we no longer know what to do with the corpses.

20 million birds are buried and treated as waste.

(…) Intensive farms are real relay antennas for the virus.

We must learn the lessons of this calamity: it is urgent to reduce the number of farmed animals and to initiate an exit from intensive farming.

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42 outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza have been confirmed in Deux-Sèvres since the arrival of the virus in this department in mid-February and a million poultry have been slaughtered there, according to the prefecture, which assured last week that “the progression of the epidemic remains under control” but that it is “continuous”.

The number of slaughters will increase because the prefecture launched in mid-April a second phase of "depopulation" of farms, in order to "give priority to the protection of breeding sites", numerous in this department and which provide young poultry from farms all over France.

“We make a kind of cordon sanitaire around sensitive sites in which we slaughter farms that are healthy, in which there have been no detected cases, to be sure that there is not an outbreak around of a hatchery or breeding site", explained the prefect Emmanuelle Dubée.

215 farms are involved in this second phase.

The first had led to slaughter in 41 farms.