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A century ago, the average American chicken flock contained 70 birds. It was a time of backyard coops and small farmers, before consolidation and vertical integration and the methods that accompanied them. Nowadays the 9 billion chickens slaughtered for meat each year in the U.S. are raised in buildings containing, on average, 20,000 or more birds, with roughly one square foot of space apiece.

“If we wanted to design how to make great virulence, this would be how.”

https://nautil.us/the-unnatural-history-of-bird-flu-1189930/