Mad Chicken Disease

Don't you wish that all diseases had the word mad in them. Mad Flu Disease, Mad Ear Infection Disease, Mad Herpes Disease. I think it would be a lot more fun. The real thing I want to talk about is Bird Flu (Avian Influenza). If any of you have not heard, a flock of chickens at a chicken house here in West Fork tested positive for bird flu. Luckily it was the H7N3 virus that they found, which is not considered dangerous for people. The bad one that has jumped from bird to human and killed people overseas is the H5N1. It is still a big deal, the last time that any chickens tested positive for bird flu in Arkansas was in 1995. Anyway, this flock of chickens (15,000 to be exact) were destroyed. They think they got it from some Canadian geese that were on a pond that the farmer was watering his chickens from. You can read more about it here. So anyway, the state Livestock and Poultry Commission set a 6.2 mile quarantine area around that farm which means any poultry within that area has to be tested for the bird flu and no poultry can be moved out or sold from this area until the testing is done. Well, guess who barely falls within this area....that's right yours truly. So, today 2 really nice old guys came out to the Farm of Hale and tested our chickens. They donned their hazmat type suits and took blood from all of our chickens, there is no way to really draw blood with a needle from a chicken so they had to cut them under the wind with a razor blade and bleed them a little to get a sample. It was pretty interesting but I feel sorry for the guys because they have to try to find every person who owns chickens in the area and test them. They are going to come back and test them again in 2 weeks. Hopefully we will find out soon the results. That was our big excitement of the day.