asazuke

Hmm… a couple of days ago bird flu was found on yet another quail “farm” in Toyohashi, and another hundred thousand or more birds will be gassed and buried. This started just over a week ago when 260,000 birds were killed when the same virus was found, followed soon after with a second case. The Toyohashi area is the Quail egg centre of Japan, supplying some 70% of those little eggs that appear in bentos, so the farmers are getting a bit fed up seeing all their birds destroyed like this, but seeing the TV shots of these poor creatures shut up in those long, long lines of tiny cages it’s hard not to feel sorry for them. (the quails, that is)

Of course it’s the same for ordinary chickens too, and cows, pigs or sheep don’t really have a much better time of it. I’ve no intention of becoming a vegetarian any time in the near future; I’ll just feel more guilty about eating meat for a while. Actually we don’t really eat huge quantities – a few grams in a stir-fry or something – but that’s still quite different from zero. It would be nice to have that feeling of moral superiority, but to tell you the truth some vegetarians seem to me to be indulging a certain pickyness over what they eat that they can afford because they live in a rich country. (Eventually of course the carbon-dioxide implications will force all of us to eat a lot more tofu and lentils anyway.)

Meanwhile no-one seems to know where the flu came from; those factory farms are pretty well sealed off from wild birds and mice, but it got in somehow. I’m afraid the day will come when all the wild birds will be killed off because of their potential health risk…