We've beaten the topic to death in a couple posts below, but one comment on birds being so "susceptible to toxic gas" struck me as a little erroneous.
Here in Delaware, the industry of chicken growing had its birth. Every chicken house you see is there because of what Frank Perdue, Mountaire, and a couple of smaller firms started here in the 1950's. On the Delmarva Peninsula, an average of 6 MILLION chickens are killed and processed each and every day. Chickens are big business to say the least.
When the avian flu scare began, of course, Delaware was right back in the thick of discussions as to formulating a plan on limiting the spread if it was necessary. Planners knew that tens of thousands of birds would have to be killed quickly and incineratered on the spot to form any barrier from the spread.
They tried the toxic gas and found it to be the least effective method for jobs of that size. It would take 20 to 40 hours just to cover the chicken houses with plastic and a day of pumping carbon monoxide (the LEAST dangerous lethal gas they could find). Carbon Dioxide was too slow and nitrogen, while quite effective, was cost prohibitive in these huge houses.
Well, the answer came from a most unexpected source: cow blood.
It seems that blood from slaughter houses is routinely processed to make the foam that is used as a fire retardent for runways at airports. (You can try this at home by putting blood in a bucket and hitting it with a strong stream of water.) Most of the local fire companies have pumper engines to fight fire and the dried blood processed through an adapter and blown through a 2 foot diameter "hose" will lay down extreme amounts of foam quicky.
Chickens spook easily and with a house of 10,000 birds, firemen entering one end of the house with pumpers and hoses immediately flush all the birds to the other end of the house, many suffocating themselves there. The firemen would start laying down the foam and walk steadily towards the back of the house. Within 14 minutes, every chicken in the house had been suffocated under the foam.
The foam was then washed off with a misting nozzle of plain water. Small "Bobcat" front end loaders were brought in and the chickens were scooped up along with the shavings on the concrete floors. They were taken outside to a pit that was fed with diesel oil and dumped into the fire. Within 8 hours, all the chickens had been incinerated and the chicken house sanitized completely.
This will now be the accepted way to attempt controlling any avian virus that appears here in America and you can file this tidbit of information into that cerebral file of useless information we all keep hidden.
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Call the fire department. I am a firefighter. I didn't know we kill chickens now. I'm sure everyone at work will be thrilled!
The protein foam thing is true. It does work, and it makes a good fertilizer also. We only use it for training now days. There are more versatile foam concentrates available. Besides, the protein foam smells bad.