“We are going to be putting out sentinel chicken coops from Saskatchewan to Atlantic Canada,” Harvey Artsob, the chief of zoonotic diseases at Health Canada’s Laboratory Centre for Disease Control in Ottawa, told the magazine. 

Taking No Chances New York has spent an estimated $10 million on controlling mosquitoes that can spread the virus. There have been no new infections since last summer but Canada is taking no chances.  Experts suspect the virus was brought into New York by an exotic bird. Canadian officials plan to test the chickens once a week to determine whether they have the virus.  “Dead birds found in the wild will also be tested,” the magazine said. 
[source www.abcnews.com]

Sent to the Farm - The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported Thursday that the Sonoma council, faced with horrific stories of mounting chicken aggression, decided it was time for the chickens to go — approving a plan to roust them from the downtown plaza and distribute them to local farms in this northern California county.  One theory circulating in Sonoma is that too few hens among the many roosters has made the chickens more aggressive.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to envision a roosterless plaza,” Councilman Ken Brown said after the vote. “But I have to tell you, when it comes to a question between a kid and a chicken, it’s the kid.” 
[source: www.abcnews.com]
Followup: Dec 2000 - Merchants, tourists and citizens objected and a managed flock was later returned to the plaza.
[source: Bay City (CA) News Service]

ALBANY,  Ga., 9 May 2000 — Implanted transmitters and thinking computers may someday watch over the flocks in Georgia chicken houses, delivering food and adjusting comfort levels far more precisely than their human caretakers ever could.

Takoi Hamrita, an assistant engineering professor at the University of Georgia, has linked dime-sized radio transmitters embedded under the chickens’ breast bones with computers that use artificial intelligence. Her research goal is to reduce heat stress and to regulate the birds’ diets for maximum growth.  “When this is developed and commercialized, growers will really have an intelligent assistant,” said Hamrita, who was invited to Washington recently to give a demonstration at the Capitol. “This way of supervising and controlling something is not new. It’s very common in other industries.”  Georgia is the nation’s leading poultry-producing state with a $13.1 billion industry that generates about 40 percent of the state’s total agricultural income. 

Hamrita says her system, still in the early stages of development, will mean safer food for consumers by reducing the risk of disease outbreaks in chicken houses. It will also mean higher profits for producers by reducing the number of birds that die from heat stress. Chicken houses, just like human houses, already have electronic systems that control heat and humidity. Many chicken houses even have computer controls that measure the temperature in the house and adjust cooling fans accordingly.  Still, heat stress remains a major problem and producers lose a significant number of chickens because of overheating, especially during Georgia’s hot summers.

Hamrita believes she can improve production by allowing the birds to tell the computer when they are uncomfortable.  She uses transmitters, painlessly implanted using a local anesthetic when a chicken is 3 weeks old, to monitor the bird’s physiology. That information is relayed to a computer that is “trained” to respond to the ever-changing transmitter signals.  "At the moment, the sensors tell us only the birds’ deep-body temperature,” she  said. “Eventually, though, they will also tell us their respiration and heart rate.”

Expanding the Studies - Only a portion of the chickens in a house would need sensors.  Her studies so far have involved 36 chickens, including a dozen with implanted sensors. The next step is to try the system in a commercial chicken house with about 65,000 birds, including 100 with sensors.  “We’re almost ready to do that,” she said.     The reusable sensors would be the biggest expense, costing between $5,000 and $10,000 to implant in 100 birds, she said. The rest of the system would cost about $2,000.

Modern chickens are genetically different from the yard birds of the past, which were more hardy, but provided less meat, she said.  Today’s chickens gain 50 percent more weight on half the feed than they did 50 years ago.  “They’re going to give you the best they can give you, but you’re going to have to give them the best conditions, as well,” she said. “We have established the fact that physiological responses are a great indicator of what’s going on in a house.” 
[source: www.abcnews.com]