Bird flu has been confirmed in a Pheasant ‘farm’ near Preston, Lancashire says Defra.
The Pheasant is a non-native species which is reared in captivity in the UK and released in its tens of millions into the UK countryside each year. Millions of Pheasant poults are imported into the UK and these represent a risk of disease transmission. Despite Defra introducing measures to protect poultry keepers’ livelihoods in December it was not until mid January that Defra reminded pheasant keepers of their responsibilities. It is not clear whether this is a manifestation of the extremely close relationship between Defra and gamebird shooting, or a manifestation of the tunnel vision of Defra vets to regard ‘wild birds’ as the problem, or both or neither.
Despite the Pheasant being (bizarrely since it is not native to the European continent) the most numerous UK bird – by a long way – it appears that Defra has not tested any ‘wild’ Pheasants to see what role the commonest bird in the country, which is chased around by shooters, and which occupies a fairly similar farmland habitat to domestic poultry (certainly compared with diving ducks and geese) might play in transmitting H5N8 bird flu.
Defra say that ‘a full investigation is under way to determine the source of the infection’ but these are hollow words. Defra does not have a monitoring programme of wild birds or domestic birds or released Pheasants or transported poultry that is fit for purpose in assessing the relative risk of each to farmed poultry. Defra will state tomorrow or in the next few days that wild birds are the most likely source of infection (I predict) but they will not really have a clue, as they do not collect the data that could inform such an opinion. And in any case, wild birds include everything from Wrens to Wigeon and Pheasants to Pomarine Skuas.
Despite the fact that it has been obvious that bird flu is a persistent threat to UK poultry keepers Defra has not invested in research that might illuminate the correct response to outbreaks across the continent.
I have no doubt that wild birds are one route by which bird flu is transmitted – just as I have no doubt that Badgers transmit bovine tb to cattle and vice versa. However, I also have no doubt that Defra is doing an inadequate job in learning about how bird flu moves around the countryside. It’s just too easy to test a few wild birds and find evidence of the H5N8 virus in their bodies. This does not form a perfectly credible link between wild birds (especially ducks and geese) and interned poultry. But if you only test a small selection of wild birds then that is all you have to go on.
I wonder what Defra knows about:
- the extent to which the Pheasants were incarcerated over the past six weeks or so
- the number of Pheasants moved in and out of this ‘farm’
- the number of other poultry moved in and out of this farm
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I suppose it had to happen eventually, but DEFRA is unlikely to do anything concrete, no matter what heir “investigation” finds.
An update from DEFRA on 27th contains the following:
“The UK’s Deputy Chief Veterinary Officer has confirmed H5N8 avian flu in a flock of pheasants at a farm in Wyre, Lancashire…..
This case was proactively identified as part of a routine investigation of premises traced as a result of confirmation of the disease in Lancashire earlier this week. There is a business link between the two premises….
The flock is estimated to contain approximately 1,000 birds. A number have died.”
Nothing surprising there then, except that the owner did not report the deaths.
Perhaps that’s not surprising either.
Its an unregulated hobby with a directly damaging impact on the environment and a wide range of un-assessed risks. Its run by people with nothing more than tradition and “common sense” . IE its an amateur shambles.
What could go wrong?
They are deemed as livestock when intensively reared, when they are released they are deemed to be wild birds, then if caught up again at the end of the season they become livestock again.
Seems the shooters have been allowed a ‘by’ and consequently placed other industry livestock at unnecessary risk?
Why have Defra failed to properly undertake risk assessment and ensure that the industry complies with the regulations? Accountability Defra?
Defra = Don’t Expect Flu Related Accountability
This possibility was warned about many times. It is quite incredible that every year the shooting industry is allowed to introduce up to 50 million non-native birds into our countryside, which have a devastating effect on local populations of native reptiles and other biodiversity. Likewise the shooting industry kills our native British predators on an industrial scale, some of them illegally, to protect the ridiculously high densities of Pheasants necessary for driven shooting.
By simply turning from driven shooting, which was introduced to Britain in the 19th Century from Continental Europe, and returning to the traditional style of walking up, most of these impacts and problems would disappear. Pheasants would need to be stocked and kept at much lower population densities for walking up style shooting. The impact on native biodiversity would be much less and there would be no need for this destructive and excessive predator slaughter, often of protected raptors. And likewise the threat of introducing huge amounts of what are little more than poultry, possibly carrying bird flu to the countryside, would be greatly reduced.
Driven shooting is an extravagant display of wealth popular in the 19th Century, when estate owners liked to show off and compete with other estates on who could shoot the biggest bag of birds. It required great wealth to maintain these unnaturally high densities of game birds. Why does this 19th Century anachronism still persist in the 21st Century?
I fail to understand what these shooters get out of blasting as many Pheasants out of the sky as possible whilst beaters drive them towards them so they can be shot like live clay pigeons.
As I said in my comment on the Woodcock, Snipe and Golden Plover shooting issue, if shooters want to be seen as conservationists, then the shooting industry should start behaving as they are conservationists, and not trying to imitate 19th Century owners of grand estates, showing off their wealth, in a very needless and destructive way.
I’m also fed up with the stock answers Defra gives to petitions about this i.e. shooting is a legitimate activity and creates jobs. That is like a PR answer from the shooting industry itself. A responsible government department should clearly acknowledge the pros and cons, and not only give spin PR explanations, you’d expect from vested interests themselves. The shooting industry is specially protected simply because so many of the upper echelons of the establishment go Pheasant and Grouse shooting themselves.
The location, at Pilling near Fylde is very near to the southern edge of Morecambe Bay. So it is possible that the pheasants contracted it from a passing Wigeon. Equally, it might have been transferred to the farm by a passing shooter, gamekeeper, or someone else associated with the shooting industry.
Interesting you say you have ‘no doubt’ badgers give bTB to cattle (and vice versa) because DEFRA has also done very little to establish exactly how this happens and more importantly, to * quantify * how often it does. There is now conclusive scientific evidence that badgers actively avoid contact with cattle and so any infection path between them must be via their shared environment. We also know in detail how badgers get it from cattle but not the other way round.
But the numbers of badgers in the environment (estimated at c. 350k) pale into insignificance compared to the numbers of pheasants. The 40 million or so released every year have to be added to the survivors from preceding years (we’ve had one unusually marked cock pheasant visiting our garden for two seasons now).
So why is there this blind spot in common sense when it comes to bloodsports? If the poultry industry suddenly emptied its sheds of 40 million chickens into the countryside all at once the first thing DEFRA would think about was the appalling risk of disease transmission. No-one in their right mind would contemplate such a rash and frankly irresponsible action, and yet… because it’s pheasants, and ‘traditional’, and what ‘the establishment’ have always done, we simply accept it! Our disbelief is suspended and we enter the world of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘post-truth’!
So here’s the thing; now that DEFRA know what the risks are (as if they didn’t before), will they ban pheasants being released into the countryside this year? Will they b*ggery! The shame is it would be interesting to observe the impact (e.g. a rise in numbers) on our native birds and wildlife species if they were to do so. Still, the issue is now at the top of ‘the great agenda’ and will hopefully be yet another nail in the coffin of this pointless, anachronistic and highly damaging ‘industry’.
Peter – on Badgers and Tb; if we believe the perturbation effect (that after Badger culling tb in cattle goes up outside the cull zone) then it is difficult (I’d say very difficult) to explain it without Badgers transmitting tb to cattle. The perturbation effect seems pretty well-established scientifically.
But of course cattle transmit tb to each other and to Badgers too. And I don’t believe the Badger cull is an effective or humane, or even cost-effective approach to reducing bovine tb.
Isn’t the pertubation effect abnormal, though – badger behaviour has been perturbed and this increases transmission rates. We don’t know how and at what rate badgers transmit tb if left undisturbed.
Messi – that’s true, but it does very strongly suggest that transmission happens. it would be good to know how – as it would be good to know how bird flu transmission happens.
The ‘perturbation effect’ is highly controversial because it was only observed in the RBCT, which itself is coming under increasing scrutiny for making assumptions that do not necessarily match the data. Perturbation as in a disturbance of the normal pattern of behaviour of individuals and group dynamics certainly does change during and immediately after culling and there is also an increased risk of turning infected badgers into infectious badgers (the difference is very important). But there are serious flaws in the theory, one being that all the perturbed badgers travel only from inside the cull zone to outside it rather than across it. Equally there is a problem with the speed with which the effect was detected, which doesn’t fully take into account the natural amount of time it would take for badgers to infect other badgers and then cattle which then have to develop the disease to the extent it will be picked up at the next test. As observed it happens too fast. Also, a high proportion of the triplet areas in the RBCT had experienced culling of badgers immediately prior to the trials and so their badgers were already perturbed.
However, notwithstanding all that there is an apparent paradox for culling in that if you believe badgers are a credible infection risk for cattle then the perturbation effect makes it a very unwise thing to do and if you believe badgers are very little risk to cattle then culling is pointless in any case. There is a whopping great big gap in our knowledge of how – and crucially to what extent – badgers can infect cattle with TB. At the moment there are only theories that don’t stand up to close scrutiny whilst more and more recent science regarding the behaviour of badgers and the lack of efficacy of the SICCT skin test is pointing to the idea that badgers are not a significant contributor to cattle TB. But there we go, that’s what we’re all working on in the badger world and hopefully we will know soon before the badgers are wiped out by DEFRA and the NFU…
Peter – I do, at the moment, believe in the perturbation effect and so I do believe that culling badgers is largely pointless and a poor response to bovine tb.
I seem to recall that the appalling Wild Bird Trade [import of “pet” birds such as wild taken parrots and exotic finches] was finally stopped in the UK due to concerns over bird flu being found in quarantined wild birds in Essex…in 2005. Can we look forward to a similar ban on reared pheasants from the continent?