The paranoia about bird flu was bound to lead to bird killing. Bird flu appears to be spreading fast and the responses of national authoritties are to kill birds in their thousands.

The BBC reports Indian officals involved in mass bird exterminations (half a million) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4728952.stm German soldiers have been sent in to a German region affected by bird flu. (What are soldiers supposed to do against a virus?)

Nobody forced us to keep millions of chickens, largely in horrific battery conditions in Western Europe. We are hopelessly prodigal with chicken life and expect to buy chickens and eggs for almost nothing.

When a consequence of this food policy bits us in the butt, what is the usual response? Kill them off. The desire to kill domesticated chickens is doubtful enough but the fact that wild birds have also been found with the virus suggests that killing wild birds is probably next.

The possibility of massive damage to the ecosystem from this sort of action would probably only concern us when there are too few birds left to prevent mass extinctions. This is really too horrible to contemplate.