Indonesia's birds in the hand

As a follow-up (and perhaps a needed clarification) of the last post, we find an interesting BBC story this a.m. about "Indonesia's bird flu dilemma."

In the earlier post we noted the government's reluctance to enforce a mass cull (in other words, mass industrial-strength killing) of birds in Indonesia. Such measures have been strongly advocated by WHO and FAO (the UN Food and Agriculture Organization) and have been undertaken in Thailand, Vietnam and Hongkong, among other places. Some authorities, although not all, believe they are effective. The point of the last post was not, however, that Indonesian authorities were refusing to initiate a policy proven effective, as much as their reluctance to undertake a policy major international agencies strongly advised. The BBC article gives some good indications of the source of this hesitancy.

As human deaths from bird flu begin to mount in Indonesia, the dilemma for the Indonesian authorities is as much how to save the birds as how to save the people.

To say that Indonesians love their caged birds is a serious understatement. Almost every house has at least one cage, and often a row of them, hanging from the eaves.

Every major town has a crowded bird market lined with hundreds of cages, where a top-quality singing dove can sell for the same price as a house.

As in several other Muslims countries, doves occupy a special place of honour in the culture, with streets, companies and even a domestic airline - Merpati - named after them.

The doves are not merely kept for decoration - they are taken out and handled, treated as much-loved pets and taken to vets when they fall ill.

Tapes of champion singing doves are available in cassette shops, and are played at home to birds in the hope that they will learn to emulate the champions, and become champions themselves.

In Javanese folklore, a man is only considered to be fully a man if he has a house, a wife, a horse, a keris (traditional dagger) and a singing dove in a cage.

Against this background, the BBC report draws the analogy between a mass killing of birds in Indonesia and a mass killing of cats and dogs in the UK (or for that matter, in the US). In the recent Hurricanes in the US we saw that people routinely put their own lives in danger by refusing to evacuate without household pets. In addition, eighty-percent of poultry in Indonesia is of the backyard household variety. Thus enforcing and carrying out mass kill policy would be a formidable political and logistic operation.

Thus, while mass killing may be possible in some places, it looks infeasible in Indonesia, an explanation for why the government keeps saying the are "about to do it" but never do.

In my own view, mass culling is unlikely to halt the spread of this disease in any event. It is too late for that, if it ever were possible.