They’re coming for your backyard chickens…

Kit Knightly

Since the “bird flu outbreak” first hit the headlines OffG has been predicting how the inevitable agenda would unfold.

The first impact was as obvious as it was predictable – the price of chicken and eggs went up, this was just another front in the war on food.

The second planned impact was less immediate, but just as predictable if you know how to read the media, and potentially far more harmful in the longterm – clamping down on alternative chicken farming. This includes both organic farms and individuals keeping their own chickens in their garden.

It didn’t take long for the media to prove us right. In fact the Guardian has done it twice in the last ten days.

Firstly, last Thursday, the Guardian ran this article: “Spread of ‘free-range’ farming may raise risk of animal-borne pandemics – study”

Sponsored by the NGO Open Philanthropy, this piece reports that organic and free-range farming could increase the risk of a zoonotic disease outbreak, and quotes the authors of this new study:

If we can’t dramatically cut meat consumption then intensive ‘factory farming’ may be comparatively less risky

…yes. they’re actually arguing that the corporate mega-farms are better at preventing pandemics than free-range or organic farms because they have “tighter biosecurity controls” (meaning their animals never go outside or interact with nature in anyway whatsoever).

Then, in this piece from June 19th, The Guardian asked…

Bird flu is on the rise in the UK. Are chickens in the back garden to blame?

Which quotes the head of virology at the government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (Apha):

The more humans are in contact with birds in an uncontrolled way, the greater is the theoretical risk that people can get infected,”

“Uncontrolled” is very much the key word there.

This scare campaign is not new. Three weeks ago an outbreak of salmonella in the US was blamed on people keeping their own chickens.

Back in January, when there were barely any bird flu cases to report, The Conversation was already hosting articles claiming…

Bird flu: domestic chicken keepers could be putting themselves – and others – at risk

And calling for a new policy on backyard chickens:

This is why it will be important in the future for Defra and APHA to provide specific policy for backyard chicken keeping.

It’s pretty easy to see where this is going, isn’t it?

But why take aim at ordinary people keeping a handful of chickens in their back garden?

Well, partly because they simply want to cut the amount of natural food people eat – most especially meat, but also eggs and other dairy produce. They want people entirely reliant on mega-corporations for their processed cubes of “food”.

But they also want people entirely reliant on the state for permission to do…almost everything. And in, some ways, the Covid pandemic narrative was counterproductive in that cause.

One of the unintentional effects of Covid in general and lockdown specifically was re-awakening in people an urge to go their own way. The powers-that-be are keen to reverse that trend.

As the above Guardian article points out [emphasis added]:

This may be due to the growing number of people keeping chickens or ducks, Brown said. Many of these keepers do not have to register with any authority because of the small numbers of birds involved.

During lockdown there was a spike in people keeping their own chickens.

Under UK law, it is illegal to keep a flock of fifty or more chickens without obtaining a license from the Poultry Register (yes, that’s a real thing) – but the vast majority of private flocks are much less than fifty birds, and therefore totally unregistered.

This scare-mongering on “spreading disease” is preparing the ground for “regulation” of these small private flocks.

Will that mean an outright ban? Maybe. But at the very least, I would expect the minimum number requiring a license to begin dropping from 50, and the cost of obtaining a license to rise.

We have already seen an example of this process with homeschooling.

Nations all over the world saw huge spikes in homeschooling through 2020-2021, this surge continued even after schools re-opened.

Tens of thousands more people are homeschooling in the UK than were before the lockdown started. The government response has been to re-open their years-old war on homeschooling by creating a national register of homeschooled children, and threatening parents with fines or unspecified “sanctions” for refusing to sign-up for it.

The same exact process will likely be seen with backyard poultry.

That’s the specific and practical part of it.

More poetically put, the state resents them because they are free.

Keeping a few chickens in your garden may be a small, fragile, kind of freedom…but its freedom nonetheless, and power structures are easily petty enough to destroy even that modicum of independence.

At its heart, self-reliance of any kind is the antithesis of everything driving us toward the “new normal”.

No freedom. No independence. No living outside the carefully controlled machinery of the state. That’s their aim.

As we phase out of “Covid time” and career towards “world war 3 times” or “climate change times” or whatever the next stage of the grand narrative is, the gears of the state are intent on grinding up those pockets of resistance their relentless overreach has accidentally cultivated.

The good news here is that their ever-more tyrannical efforts to control people will only end up driving more and more people away.

To quote the philosopher Lucas, the more they tighten their grip, the more people will slip through their fingers.