Clinica Veterinaria: Bird Flu is Back

We suppose everyone knows we are under a sanitary alert due to a worldwide bird flu outbreak. Last 10-11-2025 they established a mandatory confinement of the poultry (hens, ducks, geese, turkeys, peacocks) at certain areas in Spain in order to prevent a quick spreading of the disease. So, from this moment, poultry in these areas must be kept indoors by law. A week later, this regulation expanded to all the territories in Spain, and included self- consumption farms.

How does this regulation affect people?

First of all, if you have poultry in a non-profit way at your private property (finca, big garden, country house), you are considered to have a self-consumption farm, even if you are keeping the birds just at companion ones, not intending to eat them or their eggs. Even in this case, you are obliged to register your poultry. Registration is mandatory and FREE (if you have a look at the Internet, you will find people calling it “poultry tax”. It’s absolutely false). All you have to do is to fill in a form. If you don’t know how to do it, we can help you. Just email us.
Poultry living in public gardens or parks (not protected areas such as El Clot or Las Salinas) will be removed from those places, so we won’t see them for a while. The reason is preventing wild birds, specially migratory ones, which are important vectors for the virus, to contact local birds and transmit the disease to them. So far, there is no risk for human beings.
Prices of eggs and chicken meat are rising, because of the virus itself, but mainly because the virus is used as an alibi by the omnipresent speculators at food supply chain. Since last summer, more than 2 millions of hens in farms have been destroyed due to bird flu outbreaks. Why do we say “destroyed” instead of “slaughtered”? Because one way or another, hens were going to be slaughtered, but the difference is, in this case, their remains were completely destroyed for stopping the disease from spreading, which would cause even bigger economic loss, instead of processed for obtaining chicken meat, nuggets or chicken wings.

The really big problem will appear when the virus, after managing to “jump” from birds to mammals, manages to jump directly from mammal to mammal, and finally, from human to human. There have been reported in USA, where the disease is in a stage about 6 months more “advanced” than Europe, some cases of cats, rats and cows, which have caught the disease, and even died, of bird flu, but so far no transmission from cat to cat has been reported, but there have been some cases of cats catching the disease from ingesting milk or meat from infected cows.

Is this a problem just involving poultry? No, every bird may catch the disease. As a matter of fact, hundreds of thousands of sea birds have died these last years at America coast and Antarctica. And here, in Spain, about 500 cranes died at Laguna de Gallocanta.

The disease has also affected severely entire populations of sea lions and sea elephants, killing from 50 to 95% of their individuals.

We recognize it can be a bit tiring to repeat and repeat all these alerts, but we believe science based information is the best tool for protecting people, birds, resources, economy, environment, etc.

One final recommendation: don’t touch wild birds which look ill or suspicious, and don’t let your cats eat them, just in case. And, despite it’s got nothing to do with bird flu, keep your human flu and SARS-nCoV-2 vaccines updated.