(Beth Clifton collage)
The bees-at-the-airport disaster story went global––but mass media missed the biggest issues
KENAI, Alaska––More than 300 Alaskan beekeepers, most of them fruit and vegetable farmers, without native honey bees to pollinate introduced food crops, on April 23, 2022 expected to receive two million bees from Sacramento to help start their short growing season.
Soldotna beekeeper Sarah McElrea, who runs Sarah’s Alaska Honey “and also teaches classes and coordinates shipments of bees to beekeepers around Alaska, was waiting at the Anchorage airport” for the 800-pound first of two scheduled shipments, reported Sabine Poux of Kenaii Public Radio, KDLL.
“We had a load going to Fairbanks, and then we had somebody else who was going to distribute from Wasilla to Talkeetna,” McElrea told Poux. “And then we were going to do Anchorage and the [Mat Su] Valley. And then our second load would have come in the following day and we would have taken that one back down to the [Kenai] peninsula to fulfill the rest of our orders.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Bees bumped from flight
Delta Air Lines, however, bumped the bees from originally scheduled direct flight to Anchorage, then rerouted them to the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
There the bees were to have been put aboard a different direct flight to Anchorage.
By the time the bees reached Anchorage, they would have traveled three times as far as they were booked to travel, and would have been in transit more than four times as long, without food or water.
That alone would have killed most of the bees, even had they not been subjected to the Atlanta heat, in excess of 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Bad situation made worse
“When they didn’t make that flight, McElrea really started to worry,” Poux reported. “Honey bees don’t do well in extreme heat. McElrea asked that the bees be put in a cooler.
“But the next day, the airline told her some bees had escaped from their crates and so Delta put them outside,” in direct sunlight on the hot pavement.
Testified McElrea, “I really panicked when I found they had moved them outside because the pheromones that honey bees emit are attractive to other honey bees native to the area.”
Resumed Poux, “Sure enough, outside bees gathered around the crate, so it looked like more bees were escaping.”
(Beth Clifton photo)
Didn’t want bees on a plane
Fearing that bees would infest the flight, Delta Air Lines refused to load the crate.
McElrea called Atlanta beekeeper Edward Morgan, a Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association board member. Though they were not previously acquainted, Morgan rushed to help.
Finding most of the bees dead, Morgan summoned more than a dozen other beekeepers to help try to save the rest. The few surviving bees were distributed among the local beekeepers’ hives.
By coincidence, word of the bee-shipping catastrophe first went national and then international on April 29, 2022––the same day that Matilde Nuñez del Prado Alanes of the vegan advocacy news web site Sentient Media published an essay entitled “Insect Farming Might Be Sustainable—But Is It Ethical?”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Agribusiness asks only, “Is it edible? And profitable?”
Long before the 7,000-year history of human beekeeping began, insects were a major part of our ancestors’ diet. Indeed, all mammals alive today are believed to have descended from small insectivores who emerged in the Jurassic epoch.
“According to the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization,” del Prado Alanes explained, insects are “still part of the traditional diet of at least two billion people around the world, mostly in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Many of the insects on the human menu these days are farmed, no longer excavated from hollow trees and termite mounds with sticks, as our primate ancestors did it and our chimpanzee relatives still do it.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Crickets
“Such is the case in Thailand,” del Prado Alanes observed, “where experts estimate there are 20,000 small-to medium-scale cricket farms and about 5,000 farms for palm weevil larvae, and in China, where there are even some industrial-scale cockroach farms intended mainly for the production of medicines and animal feed.
“Cambodia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Kenya also have insect farms, mostly for crickets. Most of these farms are small-scale and not technologically developed,” del Prado Alanes assessed.
But the bug business is spreading.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Soldier flies in dog food
“Recently, the European Union authorized the use of insects as animal feed, and the United States approved the use of black soldier flies in dog food. Also,” del Prado Alanes mentioned, “Canada allows the marketing of food products based on insects of some species for both human and animal consumption.”
Added del Prado Alanes before segueing into an extensive discussion of recent research demonstrating insect sentience, “According to Statista, the global edible insect market could grow from $406 million in 2018 to $1.2 billion by 2023. The projections are so high that even some food industry giants, such as Wilbur Ellis, Cargill Inc., and McDonald’s have thrown their hats in the ring.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
50 trillion insects per year
Del Prado Alanes quoted Jeff Sebo, director of the Animal Studies M.A. program at New York University, and Jason Schukraft, senior research manager at Rethink Priorities.
Sebo and Schukraft together recently wrote that, “If industry predictions prove accurate, [insect] farms might soon kill upwards of 50 trillion insects a year. That is more insects killed for food in a single year than the number of mammals killed by humans for food in the entire history of civilization.”
Sebo, Schukraft, and del Prado Alanes overlooked that farmers and the food processing, packaging, storage, and retailing industries probably kill many times more insects per year already, through pesticide applications to protect crops and food awaiting human and animal consumption.
Add to that the trillions of insects killed to protect animals raised for food and fiber from parasites.
In that light, killing 50 trillion insects per year for actual human consumption may not represent a huge increase in the total.
Del Prado Alanes did not mention that agribusiness might be developing interest in insect farming simply because, as public empathy for mammals and birds used in food production rises through the efforts of animal advocates, regulation of farming conditions may increase, whereas hardly anyone advocates for insects.
Jackdaw & hedgehog.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Bug farming might be more sustainable, but not more ethical
But del Prado Alanes concluded that, “Despite the [insect] industry’s promise to be more sustainable than traditional animal farming, it will be virtually impossible for it to be more ethical. Insect farming won’t reduce animal suffering. It will just add more species to the food system.”
Adding more species to the food system is unlikely, in view the vast inventory of insect species who are already collateral casualties of food production by any means, whether to produce an organic vegan diet or to feed inveterate and unrepentant carnivores.
Many more insect species may, however, soon contribute to the “income” side of agribusiness ledgers, rather than just the “expense” side.
Meanwhile, as academic argument rages over the sentience and capacity for suffering of insects, there has been no serious dispute in modern times about the sentience and capacity for suffering of birds.
Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), a founder of the science of ethology, or animal behavior science, initially studied graylag geese and jackdaws as surrogates for human behavior, before focusing exclusively on animal behavior, and before collaborating to an uncertain extent with the Third Reich, which he later denounced, in orchestrating the Holocaust.
“Balaam and the Ass,” by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1626, fairly obviously inspired the ASPCA logo.
Rembrandt Foods
Despite the practically undisputed sentience and capacity of birds for suffering, and in paradoxical contrast to the global explosion of concern and outrage over the deaths of the two million bees who roasted to death on the pavement at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, practically no one noticed the comparable deaths of 5.3 million hens at a Rembrandt Foods egg barn complex in Rembrandt, Iowa, until more than a month afterward.
While the bees might be said to have died accidentally, through human stupidity, the hens were killed deliberately, through a perverse exercise of human intelligence to find the most cost-efficient response to an outbreak of the H5N1 avian influenza.
Hardly anyone who was not directly involved might ever have noticed, despite protests orchestrated by Direct Action Everywhere, if Chris McGreal of the British-based Guardian newspaper chain had not headlined on April 28, 2022, “U.S. egg factory roasts alive 5.3 million chickens in avian flu cull – then fires almost every worker.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Ventilation shutdown plus”
Before McGreal, only Tom Cullen of the weekly Storm Lake Times, reaching about half as many readers as ANIMALS 24-7, had revealed that Rembrandt Foods culled the hens “using a system known as ‘ventilation shutdown plus,’” McGreal summarized, “in which air is closed off to the barns and heat pumped in until the temperature rises above 104 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Recalled McGreal, “An animal rights group, Animal Outlook, used freedom of information laws to obtain records of experiments at North Carolina State University that show ‘ventilation shutdown plus’ causes ‘extreme suffering’ to the hens as they ‘writhe, gasp, pant, stagger and even throw themselves against the walls of their confinement in a desperate attempt to escape.”
The same method was used to kill millions of perfectly healthy pigs in 2020 when COVID-19 outbreaks among slaughterhouse workers caused a systemic backup in pig slaughter, transport, and breeding.
Rather than feed the pigs for extra weeks, eroding profits, agribusiness chose to use “ventilation shutdown plus” to cook them to death.
(Beth Clifton collage)
All killing is not “euthanasia”
James Roth, director of the Center for Food Security & Public Health at the Iowa State University college of veterinary medicine, acknowledged to McGreal, McGreal wrote, “that ‘ventilation shutdown plus’ causes more suffering than other forms of culling,” such as flooding barns with firefighting foam, “but said it is the most efficient means of containing the spread of bird flu because it is relatively swift.”
Explained Roth, “The rationale is that the influenza virus spreads so fast it will go through a poultry house really rapidly. All of those birds produce massive amounts of virus in the air. Then you have a big plume of virus coming from that house that spreads to other poultry houses. It’s critical to get the birds euthanized before that virus becomes a huge plume of virus to spread.”
Roth should know that torturing animals to death does not fit the dictionary definition of euthanasia as “the practice of intentionally ending life to relieve pain and suffering.”
(Beth Clifton photo)
What the public should know
What the public should know, and the practice of “ventilation shutdown plus” demonstrates, is that animal suffering is really of no concern to agribusiness, whether the victims are bees, hens, or for that matter the 250-odd Rembrandt Farms employees who were thrown out of work when all of the 5.3 million hens were dead and buried.
(Beth & Merritt Clifton)
What the public should also know is that while there is no escaping the collateral harm done to insects in food production, even by organic farmers who kill bugs by means other than chemical pesticides, complicity in the suffering of animals from the largest to the smallest is most easily reduced by simply not eating animals and animal byproducts.
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Thanks for this, Merritt & Beth! I’ve spent three decades banging my head against a wall trying to get animal advocates to care about insects with issues like the ones you raise here on my mind. Perhaps this article will help.
As a person who has raised poultry and enjoyed the company of pet hens who would sit on my lap and SING…I find this ventilation shut down idea to be EXTREME CRUELTY and beyond reason. This is corporate management at work. No concern for the suffering of the poultry. No concern for the workers at the facility. It is beyond my comprehension how such a method can be legal. With regard to the bees, it surely doesn’t take much in the way of BRAINS to understand that those bees were suffering in the extreme heat. Delta Cargo management better get their trip together. AND I am reading reports from friends who ship live birds and animals that Delta Cargo at Atlanta is NOT KNOWN FOR DOING THINGS RIGHT!!! Thanks for publishing this news. We need to know about these improper actions.
Having written and spoken out loudly and frequently against the term “euthanasia” to describe the intentional torturous murder of farmed animals and laboratory animals in particular, I cite for example the article published on Sentient Media in 2020 coauthored by myself and Barbara Stagno of Citizens for Alternatives to Animal Research and Experimentation, titled “Understanding Euthanasia: When Life and Words Become Meaningless”:
https://upc-online.org/thinking/200618_understanding_euthanasia-when_life_and_words_become_worthless.html
Disgustingly, this industry euphemism, popularized by the veterinary profession and its institutional collaborators, is routinely employed not only by the mainstream media but even by animal advocacy organizations as occurred in one case just last week. Imagine calling the mass-murder of human beings “euthanasia.” Doing so where birds and other nonhuman animals are concerned shows how detached most people are from the rest of the living world. Calling ventilation shutdown, killing by an infusion of carbon dioxide poison and slow suffocation under toxic firefighting foam is the final moral injury we inflict on our innocent and defenseless victims. Let us remember that when birds are blanketed under firefighting foam, they are being forced to ingest this toxic-chemical substance as they try, hopelessly, to breathe. Animals subjected to carbon dioxide poisoning trying desperately to both breathe and expel the poison only succeed in taking more of this painful, panic-producing substance into their respiratory systems.
Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns. http://www.upc-online.org
As soon as I saw this headline last night, the first thing that popped into my mind was something I had just read a few hours earlier regarding court testimony during one of the early hearings involving the 17 Silver Spring monkeys who were under the barbaric care of Edward Taub, and with regards to the deplorable conditions which the monkeys were kept in when not subject to the brutally cruel experiments, the person being questioned responded stating that monkeys are filthy animals anyway, and that the cockroaches provided a source of ambient protein!!!
As I continued to read this article just now today, once again I am really astonished at both the level of ignorance and cruelty that humans seem to exhibit more often that not when it comes to animal welfare today.
Exceptional reporting here yet again, and while I find these kinds of articles most upsetting, I feel it is very important to know the truth, and appreciate that you continue to put these kinds of articles out, as they really have compelled me to get back into the whole animals rights movement.
The Silver Spring Monkeys case was PETA’s first big case, and it was my initiation into a major undertaking within the developing animal rights movement in the mid-1980s. My husband and I were among those who broke into NIH to protest NIH’s funding of Edward Taub’s sadistic “research” and to plead, unsuccessfully, for the monkeys’ release to a sanctuary.
All kind of activities on behalf of the Silver Spring Monkeys were comprised in that PETA campaign including candlelight vigils at the head of NiH’s house, stationing ourselves on the grounds of NIH for a couple of months till late at night each night, and standing on Rockville Pike with big posters depicting the tortured monkeys. The animal rights artist Walt Rave painted huge images of the monkeys on huge white cloth for everyone traveling on Rockville Pike to see. A large group of activists occupied the 11th (?) floor of NIH for several days. My husband and I joined with the support group outside the building. In the end, NIH refused to allow the monkeys to go to a sanctuary. They would not “cave in” to animal rights pleadings.
While at the time it seemed as though animal experimentation could be defeated, obviously that never happened. I don’t know where the Silver Spring Monkeys ended up, but since it was NIH who decided where they would go, I’m sure it wasn’t a sanctuary.
After the prosecution of Edward Taub and subsequent appeals were done, the National Institutes of Health sent the 17 “Silver Spring monkeys” to the Tulane Regional Primate Research Center in Covington, Louisiana, then transferred them to the Delta Primate Center in June 1986. There they were all either euthanized or used in terminal experiments by mid-1990.
wow, Karen… that must have both been an amazing experience but also quite stressful and sad to have been a part of that, and actually experience this when it happened.
Thanks for sharing that reply, it really meant a lot to me for you to share that, as I am trying to learn everything I can about that horrible case, among others….
Thanks for this information. That last statement summarizes it pretty well for us: “What the public should also know is that while there is no escaping the collateral harm done to insects in food production. . .complicity in the suffering of animals from the largest to the smallest is most easily reduced by simply not eating animals and animal byproducts.” That’s one of the most important takeaways, and if in doubt, leave it out.
“What the public should also know is that while there is no escaping the collateral harm done to insects in food production complicity in the suffering of animals from the largest to the smallest is most easily reduced by simply not eating animals and animal byproducts.”
I appreciate the point that managed bee deaths are only a small part of how agriculture harms insects, but I think it’s nevertheless a problem that deserves to be addressed. The scale of bee deaths from managed pollination is vastly greater than one might realize from individual high profile incidents like this.
“Entomologists are currently studying the reasons behind the enormous bee die-off happening worldwide. Beekeepers across the United States lost 45.5% of their managed honey bee colonies from April 2020 to April 2021, according to preliminary results of the 15th annual nationwide survey conducted by the nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership”
https://www.planetbee.org/why-bees-are-dying
There were 2.71 million managed bee colonies in the US in 2020, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/755263/bee-colonies-us/
“It is estimated that approximately twenty-five thousand to one hundred thousand bees make up a single honey bee colony”
So, we’re talking a maximum of 2,710,000,000,000 bees. 45.5% dying in a year means would thus mean 1,233,050,000,000 bees dying. The 8,127,632,113 chickens dying in the US as a result of the poultry industry according to https://animalclock.org/#section-numbers are a comparative drop in the bucket. The animal advocacy movement gives lie to the notion that it rejects speciesism in placing its emphasis on comparatively tiny numbers of vertebrates over vastly greater numbers of invertebrates harmed by agriculture. Many of the same animal activists who condemn Rene Descartes for his view of animals as mindless automatons hold he same belief about insects, a position that puts them out of step with decades of cognitive ethology and neuroscience research suggesting that insects are, in fact, cognitively complex, aware beings. And the strongest evidence in that regard has been collected in the study of bees.
Honestly, if we’re talking managed bees, eating plant-based this isn’t really helpful, since most of the crops that are most dependent on managed bees are grown for direct human consumption. I think we need to get away from the false animal-based food/plant-based food dichotomy and consider the animal impacts of all food production (while not losing sight of the colossal resource consumption of animal ag). There are less harmful ways to feed ourselves, but they aren’t particularly compatible with the global mass production capitalist food systems responsible for most of the plant-based foods we eat. This is part of why I feel that we have overemphasized personal consumption choices and placed far too little focus on organizing for systemic change, coupled with pioneering less harmful and more sustainable models of food production and collection (e.g. food forestry, food waste prevention and recovery, rewilding and wild food foraging, veganic permaculture) and distribution and cooperative, local economic models that aren’t profit dependent to support them. There’s also not great evidence that personal consumption choices have a causal effect in reducing overall production, so, while they are valid as a form of lived propaganda to highlight injustices in the food system, it’s quite possible that they are resulting in no direct reduction in harm to animals at all.
While I do not disagree with Adam’s contentions and concerns regarding insects, their sentience, and the suffering we inflict on them as individuals and in inconceivable numbers, I take issue with his referring to the billions of chickens, fishes, and other billions of animals per year, even per day, who are tortured and murdered for human consumption as “tiny.” Billions of creatures are not “tiny,” so this word choice is inappropriate. My organization United Poultry Concerns focuses on chickens and other birds trapped in our food and entertainment systems, but I wouldn’t dream of slighting advocacy for cows, goats, and other creatures whose numbers are far smaller, but still enormous, by dismissing their numbers, or them, as “tiny.”
Secondly, whatever systemic changes are recommended to help all animals, it is time to stop insisting that personally rejecting an animal-based diet in favor of an animal-free diet “doesn’t work” or doesn’t matter. Animal advocates have no business telling people that taking personal responsibility for their own behavior is irrelevant or “tiny.” We need to stop framing solutions (if in reality there are any that will ever be implemented) in terms of Either/Or. People focused on systemic change who are not willing to change their own personal eating habits need to understand how naive and irresponsible it is to believe that government agencies and corporations can change or be changed, as meanwhile such people are unwilling to change themselves for what they claim to care about and seek to achieve.
Given that our economic system is based in large part on supply and demand, there is reason to hope that fewer customers for animal products could make a difference. We all are seeking ways to help our animal victims and the planet that we treat like a bottomless garbage can. So far, “what works” remains to be seen. One thing that will never work is continuing to be a customer for cruelty.
Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns. http://www.upc-online.org