As bird flu (H5N1) now infects US dairy cattle, contaminating milk and meat according to some reports, the practice of feeding cows "chicken litter" has come under the microscope.
According to University of Nebraska Medical Center, chicken litter "is a mixture of chicken feces, feathers and bedding materials"sweeped up from chicken coops, and typically used as a fertilizer and as feed for cattle." Yes, cows are eating sh_t.
Dairy producers adamantly deny that feeding cows sh-t is behind the growing bird flu cases in dairy cattle that are infecting their operations but they do not deny the practice! Scientists say the profit-driven feed method can spread salmonella and E. coli. (Who remembers that the "mad cow" outbreak in the US emanated from feeding cows their dead brethren--yes, making them into cannibals?)
Of course Covid-19, which is still active, also jumped species as bird flu is now doing in dairy cattle--from bats to wet market-slaughtered animals to humans.
When a virus jumps species watch out. The 1918-1920 flu pandemic which killed an estimated 50 million was a bird flu that jumped to pigs".and then humans. "Nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves," says Wikipedia of the pandemic, sometimes called the Spanish Flu.
And Covid 19 was simply reissuance of the 2003-timed SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) which originally jumped from bats to civet cats, dined-upon in Southeast Asia to humans. "Because some of the [early Covid] patients worked at a seafood market where birds, snakes, and organs of rabbits and other game were also reportedly sold, there was concern that the pathogen might have come from animals as SARS probably did reviving memories of the epidemic that killed almost 800 people about 17 years ago," wrote Bloomberg at the time. No kidding.
China's response to SARS was to drown, incinerate and electrocute 10,000 civet cats. Eight hundred people died from SARS before it resurfaced as Covid which killed 36 million.
Like rhino horn and tiger bone, civet cats are thought by some in China to have medicinal value when consumed. "They are kept live in cages at restaurants that serve
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