Record temperatures have been causing mass poultry deaths in western France since June 22, Reuters reported. The heat wave, with temperatures exceeding 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit), is also behind the drowning of 40 people. Météo-France, the French national weather service, wrote in a statement that June 24 and 25 were the hottest days recorded in France since records began in 1947. Yann Nedelec, head of ANVOL, a French poultry-sector organization, estimated that at least several hundred thousand poultry in both indoor and outdoor farms died, though he told Reuters it was too soon for a precise death count. Chicken farmer Clement Blanchard, based in Saint-Andre-Goule-d’Oie, a commune in Pays de la Loire, told Reuters that around 700 of his chickens had died over the span of a few days, compared to an average death rate of one or two per day. “We’re faced with the same thing with our animals as we are ourselves: they suffer enormously from the heat, and so at times like this there are abnormally high death rates,” he told Reuters. Stéphane Delapré, a poultry breeder in Beauvoir-sur-Mer in Normandy, northwestern France, told AFP that the heat on June 22 had killed roughly half of his 17,600 chickens. “Half of the chickens died, suffocated by the heat: those that were in the buildings and also those that were under the trees,” he said. “In [my] 42-year … career, I have never seen anything like it.” The Chamber of Agriculture in both Brittany and Pays de Loire,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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Wait, I didn't know about this. Do you mean some bully hens prevent certain others from being able to go outside? Do you have a link to an article about this?
Crap. Hmm...
Nah. Hens are crammed in by the thousands, when normally there wouldn’t be more than tens of chickens in a group in the wild ( though the chickens we have now are very far removed from wild chooks due to selective breeding. Example being that wild chooks lay 10-12 eggs a year. Much like humans. But the chooks we use for egg laying lay 1-2 A DAY), so moving around in the shed where there are tens of THOUSANDS of chooks, makes it hard to get to the door to get out.