Tragedies show flaws in Manitoba’s food system

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/05/2022 (1250 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ACCORDING to current numbers from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), approximately 15,000 birds have died or been killed in Manitoba owing to the current avian influenza outbreak. The highly contagious H5N1 virus is ripping through confined poultry populations, causing over 1.7 million birds to die or be killed nationwide to date. Flu, however, is not the only issue causing unexpected death among farmed animals in Manitoba, and beyond.

Approximately 2,000 pigs and nearly 2,000 calves have also recently experienced horrific deaths due to bouts of extreme weather in the province — climate chaos caused in part by the very industry it is so heavily impacting. These brutal cases of animal death and destruction are revealing an animal-based food system that is fragile, cruel, and certainly unsustainable.

As reported by the Free Press earlier this month, around 2,000 pigs died after an April storm caused power outages at a HyLife operation near Kola, Man. What was not made apparent in the company’s statement, though, is how these animals died. Very likely it was due to suffocation, after ventilation systems failed and toxic gases accumulated in the air. It’s an awful way to go, and far from a quick death. (One case study from the U.K. showed pigs suffered for over 16 hours due to ventilation failure.)

Believe it or not, ventilation shutdown, as it is called, is an approved method of on-farm culling in the U.S., during exigent circumstances such as disease outbreaks and operation disruptions. During the early days of the pandemic, a whistle-blower in Iowa captured graphic undercover footage of a barn full of pigs being exterminated this way.

Here in Canada, ventilation shutdown is not a method of farm “depopulation” approved by the CFIA. Rather, animals killed en masse in barns here must also have CO2 gas piped in. This mass-gassing — also far from a humane way to go — is how most birds have been killed in Canada owing to avian flu.

Also reported earlier this month, nearly 2,000 newly born calves died in Manitoba as a result of unseasonably cold and wet weather. “Animals can get trapped in snow drifts,” one farmer told CBC; “animals can get buried in snow and mud.”

Animal law organization Animal Justice has filed legal complaints with the chief veterinary office over what it sees as violations to the Animal Care Act regarding both the calves and pigs.

Brittany Semeniuk, animal welfare specialist for the Winnipeg Humane Society, says that when faced with these external and environmental stressors, intensive animal agriculture simply allows no room for error. “When huge numbers of animals are housed together densely, it is essentially impossible to intervene sufficiently when they are challenged by severe weather, flooding, disease outbreaks and other pressures,” she says.

“We must face the fact that if we cannot adequately save lives and spare suffering during times of crisis, we should not be raising and housing farmed animals in the intensive manner in which we do. It is simply unethical and inhumane to accept that these living creatures, who experience stress, fear and pain, will continue to succumb to catastrophic events indisputably tied to industrialized agriculture.”

She’s right.

As seen during last summer’s “heat dome” in B.C., which contributed to the deaths of over 651,000 farmed animals, followed by flooding in the same area, causing another nearly 700,000 animals to die, and throughout other periods of serious pathogen spread among animals (COVID-19, H1N1, etc.), these recent cases of death and destruction among farmed animals in Manitoba further reveal a food system that is simply not working.

It’s not working for the animals, and it’s also not working for the planet. Globally, animal agriculture is responsible for at least 14 per cent of greenhouse emissions, which is more than all transportation sectors combined, and is a leading contributor to water pollution, land use, ocean degradation, biodiversity loss and overall climate change — the very climate change causing such unnecessary suffering and death among the animals in this system.

Climate scientists and public health experts have been screaming at us for years to make factory farming a thing of the past. Thankfully, Manitoba is a great place to get that transition started.

“Manitoba’s hemp, pea and pulse industries are rapidly expanding, bringing with them unlimited potential for the local economy,” Semeniuk explains. “Additional support must be placed on local, plant-based sources of nutrition, with a shift away from the intensive confinement of thousands of stressed, vulnerable animals.”

Indeed, studies have shown that transitioning to a primarily plant-based food system (dietary guidelines already recommended by the latest Canada Food Guide) is necessary to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Such a shift would also help prevent the spread of future zoonotic diseases. And, of course, we would no longer have to worry about pigs suffocating in sheds or calves drowning in floods.

Jessica Scott-Reid is a Winnipeg-based freelance writer and animal advocate.