Ramping up their campaign to get the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) to stop condoning the infliction of heatstroke and suffocation on millions of birds to control avian influenza on factory farms, United Poultry Concerns (UPC) is running full-page ads in Philadelphia’s largest circulated newspaper, Metro Philadelphia, targeting the AVMA’s convention, July 29-August 2. Plus a blast of digital ads displayed 200,000 times to visitors around the Convention center and delivered to animal activists, charitable donors, veterinarians, vet techs, and people with companion animals in the greater Philadelphia metro area.
The AVMA is holding its annual convention in Philadelphia this month. UPC calling on the AVMA to use the opportunity to formally oppose a merciless method of exterminating millions of helpless birds on factory farms, to control the avian influenza outbreaks that constantly infect these birds, mired helplessly in disease-spreading squalor.
Called Ventilation Shutdown-Plus, this method involves sealing up the buildings and shutting off the air supply. The “Plus” means adding intolerable levels of heat and carbon dioxide poisoning, resulting in a slow, agonizing death by suffocation and heatstroke for millions of chickens, turkeys and ducks.
U.S. taxpayers pay for these killings through U.S. Department of Agriculture subsidies aimed at protecting industry profits at the expense of the animals. Since February, 40 million birds have died this way.
Veterinarians and animal advocates have begged the AVMA to stop condoning Ventilation Shutdown- Plus as a favor to agribusiness, and to honor the Veterinarian’s Oath to prevent and relieve animal suffering and uphold the principles of veterinary medical ethics.
So far, the AVMA has turned a deaf ear.
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