swaths of rural Asia, the record is more mixed. Some small-time farmers have proven unable to compete with new industrial producers and lost their livelihoods. Others, by contrast, have found that livestock, one of the few sectors they could afford to enter, was their ticket out of poverty. For Prathum, the revolution was a bonanza—until the virus discovered the same thing.
Prathum’s wife said the livestock officers stormed into Banglane like marauding communists. “They came by the hundreds in trucks, bringing soldiers and prisoners to kill the chickens. We argued for some time. But they weren’t listening to us,” Samrouy Buaklee recounted. She raised her leathery hands in exasperation and then wiped her deep brown eyes with the checkered scarf around her neck. “It broke my heart. I felt that the chickens were like my children.”
Samrouy had retreated in tears to the house deep in the rice paddies and remained sequestered there, alone, for two days. When she returned, she noticed the silence. It’s always the silence. Over and over, farmers who lost their flocks told me it was the absence of the cackling and cooing they found hardest to bear. The village had gone dark. Farmhouse lights that once flickered on in predawn hours as villagers awoke to tend their flocks remained extinguished. The roads were abandoned. “No one walked around,” her husband recalled. “Everybody sat at home and nobody talked. With the chickens gone, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.”
After more than half a year, Prathum decided to restock, rebuilding his flock though not his confidence. When I met him, his brown eyes had grown heavy, and bags hung low on broad, sunbaked cheeks. “Even if we’re afraid of the disease returning, what can we do? Nothing. We can’t run away,” he said softly. “It’s my job. If I don’t do chicken farming, what else can I do?”
Prathum left the question hanging. He rose from the wood crate where he’d been resting in the barn and emptied a sack of chicken feed into a wheelbarrow. Emerging into the morning light, he pushed it down a short concrete causeway jutting into the fishpond and trudged past a pair of spirit houses, those colorful, birdhouse-size shrines on pedestals he had once hoped would keep the local spirits content. At the end of the causeway, three open-sided chicken sheds on stilts extended across the green water. Prathum started with one on the left, the hum from hundreds of excited hens rising to greet him. He stepped nimbly along the aging wood planks that ran between the cages, his meaty hands shoveling grain from a bucket into the long feeding trays. The plaid shirt hanging from his stocky frame was soiled and his bare feet were caked with dirt. The planks were stained with droppings, the air rank with a cocktail of feathers, feed, and feces.
As a concession to new government rules, Prathum had draped fishnet along the sides of the two sheds. This was meant to keep out wildfowl, which could be carrying bird flu. But mice had already gnawed holes in the netting, and a few crows and swallows were darting about under the corrugated metal roofs. That was the extent of Prathum’s effort to prevent contamination and stem another outbreak.
The most important line of defense against a human pandemic is not at the hospital or vaccine lab but at the farmyard gate. A single gram of bird feces can contain up to 10 billion virus particles. A speck on a heel or a pant leg or a bucket or a tire can introduce an infection capable of decimating a whole flock.
Health officials have long made clear how to prevent epidemic contagion from spreading among flocks or from farm to market and on to other farms. The first principle is to severely restrict access to poultry flocks. This means keeping chicken sheds off-limits to most visitors. Those raising birds of their own must be categorically banned. The second is strict hygiene. Anyone entering a shed should wash his hands and don sanitized shoes. Poultry workers should change into clean, disinfected clothes and take them off when they leave so they can be washed. Feeding pans and cages should be cleansed daily. Equipment, such as pallets and egg crates, are easily contaminated and should never be shared among farms. Vehicles that have visited other farms could inadvertently be carrying the seeds of disaster and should be kept at a distance. Other animals must be barred from the chicken sheds.
When Prathum’s black dachshund trotted after him into the henhouse and then curled up for a nap beneath the cages, I knew there was trouble.
Nirundorn Aungtragoolsuk, a director of disease control in Thailand’s livestock department, later confirmed as much. He told me the government had adopted strict regulations, including a requirement that poultry workers shower with disinfectant before entering a farm and vehicles be sprayed with disinfectant before arriving on premises, but these applied solely to the large, export-oriented operations. The regulations were not meant for most farms, like Prathum’s. “They have done it their way for a long time and we cannot change it overnight,” Nirundorn said.
It took Prathum half an hour to finish feeding the hens in the three sheds. He returned to the barn, sweat glistening under his thinning hair, and hopped on his Honda motorbike. With a sack of feed in the sidecar, he buzzed up his gravel driveway, across the road, and down a dirt track that paralleled a canal on the far side. His other dog, a white crossbreed, had joined the dachshund, and now the pair gave chase, scampering behind Prathum until he reached two more chicken sheds suspended above another pond. As he resumed his feeding rounds, the dogs followed him inside.
A few moments later, as he emerged to fetch more feed, a silver Isuzu pickup coated with dirt pulled up right at the entrance to the sheds. It was the neighbors. The husband, Monchai, had bad teeth, and his wife, Boonsveb, had big hair. But they also had three times as many chickens as Prathum. They had culled the whole lot when the flu erupted and replaced them all. They told Prathum they had an uneasy feeling about another outbreak and wanted to compare notes. The talk turned to the question of whether they should erect modern, all enclosed, climate-controlled sheds.
“Of course that would be better,” the wife said. “It would keep out disease. But it’s expensive.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Prathum agreed. “Who can afford it?”
“You certainly can’t afford it,” the husband quipped, needling Prathum. “You can’t even afford enough staff. You have to do the farming yourself.”
As if on cue, Prathum refilled his bucket and vanished deep into the chicken shed again. The husband, wearing cracked, dirty sandals, accompanied him inside. The dogs took up the rear as hundreds of red-crested heads poked out of the cages, viewing the procession.
Shortly after the neighbors left, another Isuzu pickup, this one red, rumbled down Prathum’s gravel driveway, pulling up in a cloud of dust just outside the barn. The cab door opened. Out got Nikon Inmaee, an egg vendor with a narrow face and short, wavy hair. Prathum had collected the eggs in the hours just after dawn, and now they were waiting, packed into plastic trays stacked ten high amid dirt and dead grass on the barn’s concrete floor.
Prathum helped Nikon gingerly hoist the trays into the truck bed. Three days a week, Prathum’s eggs were ferried to Bangkok, but this batch was headed for a closer market, about fifteen miles away. While Prathum calculated the tab on a small pad, Nikon returned to the back of his truck and began pulling out a separate set of empty trays. He deposited dozens of them in the barn for use later in the week. They were still soiled from the market. It was like addicts swapping dirty needles.
There was a time in the United States when chicken was a luxury, an indulgence for those weary of more affordable dishes like lobster and steak. Chicken was precious because it was relatively rare. In the ninteenth century, raising poultry was little more than a hobby for farmers’ wives, and in 1880, when the U.S. Census started counting chickens, they numbered only 102 million nationwide. By 2006, that number were butchered nearly every four days.
This American revolution would have been impossible but for a series of advances in animal husbandry, starting with the debut of commercially sold chicks in the late nineteenth century. Next came the development of artificial hatcheries, which lowered prices and brought chickens to selling weight faster. Companies specializing in feed emerged. Vitamin D was introduced to fight rickets. Broilers and later layers were shifted indoors, where temperature, lighting, and diet could be precisely calibrated, and then the birds were raised off the ground and confined to tiers of wire cages, where care and feeding was even easier. But the watershed was the introduction in 1971 of a vaccine for a poultry plague called Marek’s disease, which was killing 60 percent of the birds. Chicken prices plummeted, further fueling American demand already on the rise for familiar reasons: population growth, increasing income, and urbanization.
In the United States, where chicken was fast replacing beef as the animal protein of choice, safety measures to prevent disease followed quickly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an aggressive campaign to educate farmers about biosecurity. Many family farms were swallowed by integrated agriculture companies, which
