Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar on the H5N8 outbreak of avian influenza that has occurred over the winter of 2020, 2021. Before we begin the webinar, I just wanted to remind everyone that there's a comprehensive set of notes to go alongside this webinar. So rather than frantically scribbling down notes throughout the webinar, and if you just sit back and enjoy it, and then the notes will be provided on the website shortly afterwards, along with some quiz questions and then subsequently the answers as well.
For those of you who are used to attending some of the webinars I've done previously, the first few slides might seem a little bit familiar. But before I talk about the outbreak that's just happened over this winter, I thought I would cover a couple of general points regarding avian influenza. So, avian influenza is caused by an influenza A type virus, and like all influenza viruses, we can have a range of hemoglutinin numbers and neuron aidase numbers as well.
And our AI can be high path or low path avian influenza, depending on the specific strains. So normally what happens is that animal health will get an isolate. And they will carry out PCR testing to determine whether it's pathogenic enough to warrant being classed as highly pathogenic or not.
And this is done in accordance with OIE rules and regulations. In the good old days, they used to inoculate day old chicks with the virus, and they would work out based on the mortality rate, whether it was classed as high path or low path, but obviously PCR testing is significantly better from a welfare point of view and indeed significantly faster as well. Only avian influenza isolates with H5 or H7 numbers can be high path or low path.
All other hemoglutinin numbers are low path. So if it was, for example, a H1 or a H3, it would most certainly be low pathogenic avian influenza. But if it's H5 or H7, it can either be high path or low path.
And as you can imagine by the fact that I'm doing this webinar, our H5N8 outbreak this year was indeed, of course, high path. So if it's low path AI, so for example, a H1 number, animal health are not interested, nor are the OIE. But if it is H5 or H7, whether it's low path or high path animal health are interested because it can mutate from one form to the other.
So for a low path H5, the chances are that animal health would kill the birds, but if it was a H1, then there would be no culling required. In terms of our clinical signs of avian influenza, I guess you've been bombarded by BVA and by animal health over the last few months, with emails and various webinars. So just to touch again on the clinical signs of avian influenza.
Nervous signs are most certainly a concern because there's very few other things that cause nervous signs in large numbers of birds. An individual chicken may get meningitis, for example, but if you've got more than one bird with nervous signs, it does tend to sort of flag up the potential for a notifiable avian disease. Respiratory signs, as you can imagine, can be found, but there's lots of things in chickens that can cause sneezing and other respiratory signs.
And similarly with diarrhoea, it can be a feature, but again, there's lots of things that can cause diarrhoea in poultry. As with all respiratory pathogens, avian influenza can cause a drop in egg production, and because it damages the eggshell gland, it can cause abnormal eggshells. So you can see here in the photograph on the right hand side of your screen that you've got crinkly eggshells.
And that will be due to eggshelled gland damage caused by AI. But it's really important to stress, as with sneezing and diarrhoea, there's lots of other things that can cause abnormal eggshells and a drop off in egg production in backyard flocks in particular. And of course there is mortality.
I think it's very important to stress that each strain of avian influenza will cause different ranges of clinical signs, and depending on the host species of the avian influenza, that will also determine the clinical signs. So, our waterfowl tend to be Asymptomatic, whilst turkeys tend to be highly sensitive and will quite successfully die. And because waterfowl are asymptomatic, they tend to be very good carriers of it.
So we believe in most cases that our avian influenza is carried into the UK by migratory waterfowl, and then they infect the domestic waterfowl, and then subsequently this virus gets into pet chickens and into commercial flocks. So, I thought I'd put up a slide just showing the international flyways used by migratory birds across the world. And you can see that the UK is in the middle of the East Atlantic flyway, which extends across Greenland into eastern Canada and covers Northern Europe, Siberia, and heads down to Namibia and South Africa.
So, what animal health tend to do is, in the summertime, they will monitor what avian influenza strains are happening, particularly in Siberia, but also in Southern Africa, with one eye to the fact that these strains may make their way to the UK and in the following autumn and winter times. Our migratory birds tend to start arriving in the UK late August, and their peak numbers will be in the UK in December. So, we can sometimes see our early cases of AI in November, early November, with the sort of peak cases thereafter in December, January time, which is exactly what happened this year.
One of the challenges from a vet dealing with bacter in flux is how to differentiate notifiable avian disease as opposed to other respiratory pathogens. In commercial flocks, it's really easy because we've set a threshold of 0.3% mortality per day, and that gives us quite a good guideline.
And we've also said that if we've had more than a 10% drop in egg production over three days, we should be concerned. The problem, of course, in a backyard flock is, if you've got 10 chickens and 1 bird dies, you've immediately got 10% mortality. And so if that was in a commercial flock, you'd be panicking, but from a backyard perspective, it's not quite as straightforward.
The other, I guess, key difference between commercial flocks and backyard flocks is the fact that most of our commercial flocks are heavily vaccinated against common respiratory pathogens, such as infectious bronchitis, Newcastle disease, and Abe neon tracheitis, whereas our backyard chickens tend not to be. And this causes a problem because in commercial flocks, if we see respiratory disease, we can kind of in some ways, rule out infectious bronchitis, for example, but in the backyard flock, we may have infectious bronchitis and causing equally severe clinical signs to avian influenza. So it's always worth asking whether the birds were vaccinated in the last 12 months against other respiratory pathogens such as infectious bronchitis, mycoplasma, and a neon tracheitis in particular.
Always ask the owner whether or not there have been recent additions to the flock. Have they went to a local marketplace and bought some new chickens? Have they went to a show, as that can be an entry point for disease.
Generally, animal health tend to be concerned if you've got 3 or more dead chickens within a backyard flock, because that tends to indicate that it's not sort of a one-off random event. And of course, are the rest of the chickens looking ill? Normally with a lot of the notifiable diseases, our chickens will tend to look quite miserable and sick.
So if the rest of the flock are looking ill, that's a sort of a red flag to animal health when they're investigating. Are there nervous signs in the flock? As previously mentioned, Nervous signs are quite rare in adult birds, and if we do tend to see it in more than one bird, it would indicate a potential viral cause, and that again is a red flag to anyone looking at the case.
In terms of postmortem findings, there are very few signs that really indicative of avian influenza, which is why it makes it very difficult to diagnose it clinically without doing PCR testing. I guess where PM findings are useful in mortality is if you can rule out other common causes of mortality such as blackhead or for example gapeworm, because if I had, let's say 5 dead chickens in a backyard flock and I found blackhead in them, I'd be quite content that that was the cause of death and wouldn't be worried about avian influenza. The other thing is looking at whether or not there's currently known avian influenza circulating within the UK.
So if we knew that there's already cases in the UK, we should be extra sensitive and wary, whereas if it was in the middle of July, for example, and there was no cases known in the UK or indeed Western Europe, I would be a bit less concerned about the possibility of avian influenza. But as with all species, if you're in doubt, give animal health a call, and my experience as a private vet of calling animal health over this last winter to discuss cases has been very, very positive. They don't always come and investigate whenever you phone them up.
A lot of the time they will discuss it over the phone with you and they will discuss it amongst their team and come back to you with whether or not they feel they need to come and actually. Investigate the case. So it doesn't mean because you phoned them to discuss the case that they're definitely going to come out and visit the holding.
In many cases they just chatted through and they put your mind at ease as a vet because that way you've covered yourself, you've made the phone call, and if they don't come and investigate it, at least you've sort of covered yourself. I guess when dealing with backyard flocks, to try and make life easier, I think it's really important that we ask all poultry clients to register on the Great Britain poultry register with animal health. It is a legal requirement if an owner has more than 50 chickens to register on the poultry register, but for those with less than 50, it is optional.
Where being on the register is quite useful is if there's a local case of AI, animal health can get in contact with the keeper. But also, animal health send out regular updates, and if someone's on the Great Britain poultry register, they're getting notified about things like housing orders, which we will discuss later on today and getting notified about potential changes to the gatherings of poultry as well. It's quite important not to feed poultry outside in the range area, as this encourages interaction between our pet birds, or commercial free range layers, and wild birds, which can potentially act as an opportunity for a cross-infection.
It's really important not to encourage wild waterfowl, and where we've got ornamental ducks. We certainly don't want wild mallards or Canada geese coming and landing in our ponds, mixing with our ornamental runner ducks or our crested ducks. And I would strongly encourage all vets and keepers to vaccinate their backyard flocks annually, for the respiratory pathogens.
And on previous webinars, we've discussed trying to use killed vaccines for infectious bronchitis, avian rhinotracheitis, Newcastle disease, and mycoplasmic galaepticum, because that then means if you've got a vaccinated bird with clinical signs, you can be a bit more worried, whereas unvaccinated poultry can be equally badly affected with infectious bronchitis, as opposed to avian influenza. I guess the next thing to discuss really is what happens when we get a suspected case of avian influenza. I think if you ask the general public, they imagine that men and women come down in white suits to, yeah, euthanize their chickens, but it's not quite like that.
So when we call into animal health and we make that phone call, they'll decide whether they want to come and investigate it or not. And if they do want to come, they'll generally leave their office within about half an hour. They might not necessarily come if you phone them at 10 o'clock at night until the next day.
And they will over the phone serve restriction on the farm, which basically means that the owner cannot move people or objects off the holding until animal health arrive. When animal health arrive on site, they'll look at the production records, they will look at the birds, and then they decide whether or not they feel it necessary to carry out testing for avian influenza and Newcastle disease. In some cases, they look at the birds in the records and decide it's not, not likely to be notifiable disease, in which case the restrictions are removed and the animal health vet and leaves the holding, and that's the end of it.
Where animal health are not quite sure that we don't have notifiable avian disease, they will take samples and they will same day courier them to Weybridge. During the time when we're waiting on the results from Weybridge, they will put a 1 kilometre temporary control zone around the holding and whilst we wait on the results, and that temporary control zone will mean that you cannot move people, objects, poultry, or bedding off the holding on without a licence from animal health. It's highly unlikely that they would grant a licence to move birds or eggs off the site whilst they don't know what strain, if any, of avian influenza that we've got, but they would allow the movement of feed onto the holding and obviously of people off the holding, that shouldn't be an issue.
Once animal health are Got confirmation from Weybridge that we've got avian influenza. The next waiting game is to try and work out whether it's high path or low path. So if, for example, we thought it was H5 or H7, then animal health would introduce temporary control zones A and B, which corresponds to our 3 kilometre protection zone and a 10 kilometre surveillance zone.
And then once animal health know if we've got high path avian influenza, these zones would be properly converted into protection zones and surveillance zones. And again, in these zones, there's restrictions on the movement of birds, litter, and eggs. If we've got low path AI, it will be a 1 kilometre zone around the premises until we've got more information on the exact strain of avian influenza.
The next step, unfortunately, is for the affected flock to be euthanized, and there is compensation only for healthy birds killed, not for the sick ones, because I guess with the ill birds, they were going to die anyway, but for the healthy birds, it's really, really important and that there is compensation. Animal health may wish to euthanize dangerous contacts, depending on the epidemiology, and there may be exemption for some rare breeds under exceptional circumstances, but I think that you would have to make a really, really strong case to animal health to avoid having your rare breed chickens euthanized. I think that that would be very unlikely to be granted, but there is a small scope within the legislation to do that.
Once animal health have euthanized the birds, they will dispose of the birds and the bedding, and then they will carry out a cleaning and disinfection of of the holding, whether it's commercial farm or whether it is a, a backyard setting. And animal health pay for that cleaning and disinfection. However, once they've done that, there's several options open to the to the owner.
The farmer either has to carry out secondary cleaning disinfection, and the problem with that is it's got to be done to animal health's satisfaction. But what constitutes animal health satisfaction is quite vague, and so they don't really tell you what's acceptable and what's not until they come to inspect it afterwards. So it can be a bit of a minefield.
Or the other alternative is that the owner signs a legally binding document to say they will not restock the holding for the next 12 months. And in many cases, people take that option because they can't afford secondary clean disinfection. For some backyard farms or keepers, they tend to find that actually burning the coop is the most financially viable option.
And I guess if you've got a small wooden coupe, you wouldn't go and spend a fortune trying to clean it, you would just burn it and and I guess that's equally acceptable. So the next question is, why are we so concerned about secondary cleaning and disinfection? Well, The UK's default position is that we are free from avian influenza, and every time that we get a case, we've got to notify the OIE.
And according to OIE regulations, it takes 90 days from the time of the secondary CND of their most recent holding affected and until the OIE will resume the UK's disease-free status from an avian influenza point of view. Now you might think, well, why should we really care whether we're disease-free or not. But during the time when we lose our disease-free status, many countries will stop allowing the import of products of poultry origin or indeed of dale chicks or of eggs from the UK during that time frame.
And the UK is home to several genetics companies that export a chicks and they export hatching eggs across the world. So it can have a massive impact on these companies. Some countries will allow the import of their old chicks and eggs from the UK once we don't have a disease-free status, as long as the chicks or the eggs originate from holdings that are not within the SZ or the PZ.
But I have to say that it just adds a heck of a lot of paperwork and can cause a lot of headaches for anybody trying to export products of poultry origin abroad. So I guess probably of much more interest to everyone attending today's webinar is the outbreak that we've just had this winter of H5N8. And I thought I would start off by sort of giving a bit of information about the initial case in commercial poultry in the UK.
So on the 3rd of November, a case of H5N8 was detected in Cheshire in prepubescent commercial breeding birds. So these birds will have been 2 to 3 months of age. These birds were housed, and it was really odd because the initial presenting sign was strange bruising on the bird's legs.
So you can see here on this slide here that we've got sort of some bruising that you can see on the bird's legs. Now, I didn't mention in my list of clinical signs that bruising on birds' legs was a potential clinical sign of avian influenza. And that made it very difficult to pinpoint what was wrong with them because these birds were not dying, they didn't look ill at the time, and all they had was these strange bruises, and we started to think, is it traumatic?
Is it mycotoxin related? AI really wasn't on the list at that time. But of course, over time, the birds developed nervous signs and subsequently high mortality.
And obviously, once they got to getting nervous signs, that changed the the thought process on the clinical picture. But I thought it was really interesting to emphasise to people that sometimes diseases don't read the textbooks, and they don't always follow what we would expect. And I guess I would have expected respiratory signs and Nervous signs as the initial presenting signs, followed by mortality.
And so, it's quite an old one. But when you do delve into the literature, you can find reports of, of haemorrhaging on the skin of the legs in certain papers, but it certainly wasn't up there with the sort of the top presenting signs that we would have expected. So, I just thought it was quite an interesting end point to make.
Every time that we get a case of avian influenza, the first question everybody asks is, should we be housing our free-range chickens? And I think it's really important. This is a decision for animal health and not for individual keepers.
So, the sort of things that tend to get mulled over in the decision makers' minds is, are the cases predominantly in hosed birds or free range birds? What is the overall environmental challenge? So animal health will consult a number of ornithologists.
They will look at their ongoing surveillance across the UK and indeed they particularly look at what's happening in Europe. As I said, these migratory birds come from Siberia across Eastern Europe, then into the Netherlands and Germany, and then finally to the UK. So they tend to keep a tight eye as to what's happening in these countries to give us an indication as to what might be happening in Britain in a few weeks' time.
There are potentially negative welfare aspects of of housing free range birds, particularly in the backyard setting whereby the actual shed itself might be quite small, and there is an impact on the free range status of eggs. So the legislation allows housed free range birds to have their eggs sold as free range for 16 weeks after the date of housing. But if the housing order extends beyond 16 weeks, the free range eggs have to be sold as barn eggs, which obviously decreases their value, particularly for commercial free range flocks, but indeed for backyard keepers as well.
It tends to cause a little bit of concern. And I think it's really important to stress that there's other ways of reducing the risk of avian influenza incursion into flocks other than housing. So biosecurity really is the main way of reducing the risk of AI getting into a flock, and I think it's really, really important that housing is a tool that we've got to reduce the likelihood of avian influenza cases in backco flocks and in commercial poultry, but biosecurity overall is the main thing that we can do to keep it out.
Animal health carry out a number of risk assessments throughout the year. So you can see in the image on the top right hand of your screen, we've got blue dots representing wild bird cases in Europe, and we've got pink dots representing. Commercial or domestic poultry.
And I think what's important is you can see that it wasn't just the UK that did lots of cases. There was a lot in Denmark, in the Netherlands, in in Belgium and in Germany. So animal health are constantly looking at what's happening abroad.
They carried out a risk assessment in October, which said the risk was medium. And then that was escalated to medium to high, depending on biosecurity in January. And the most recent risk assessment in March said that that risk had dropped back to medium.
So they're constantly reviewing that risk with a team of ornithologists and experts involved in looking at what's happening elsewhere in the world. And these risk assessments are really important to then working out whether or not a housing order should be declared or not. In terms of our wild bird involvement in avian influenza, as I said, our migratory birds start arriving in the UK between August, and they tend to peak roughly in the sort of December time.
And these birds then leave in March. So, as we get to the end of March, the risk of AI tends to drop off a little bit. What's interesting is that the vast majority of cases this year were detected in swans, so mute swans, and in geese such as Canada geese and the pink-footed goose, which you can see in the top right hand of your screen.
Interestingly, these burns are predominantly sedentary, so they tend to be permanent residents of the UK. So what tends to happen is our migratory birds bring in the AI virus and then that infects our local waterfowl, which then acts as a reservoir for our backyard and commercial flocks. And we've also got to think about scavengers such as magpies and ravens, which will potentially eat the carcasses of dead birds that might have been influenza, and then they will go and carry the AI virus into, poultry flocks.
So, since the initial case in November, we have had 2 cases of H5NA in breeding birds, 1 in free range layers, 5 in pet chicken flocks, 1 in game birds, 4 in turkey flocks, and 2 in duck flocks. And you can see how that compares to 310 cases in wild birds. But also this year, we haven't just had H5N8.
We've had two additional cases of H5N1, 1 case of H5N3 and a case of H5N2. And so it wasn't just H5N8. H5N8 was the main avian influenza strain that was causing the issue, but there were other strains in there.
So we've had a bit of a rough year as far as the winter of 2020, 2021 is concerned. So rather than jumping initially into a housing order, what animal health done is they declared an avian influenza prevention zone. Now, that might not mean a lot to most people.
But on the 11th of November, this AI prevention zone was declared across Great Britain, and it banned poultry gatherings and required enhanced biosecurity. So whether or not the keeper had a commercial flock of 50,000 birds, or they had a flock of 5 pet chickens, boot dips were required at the entry and exit of the coops, and it was important to use a death rat-roof disinfectant at the recommended concentration. Disinfectants only work if they're not diluted, so we ideally would have a lid over the disinfectant dip to make sure that we keep up rainwater.
We want to protect the chemical inside from UV light, which will inactivate it, and we want to also try our best to minimise organic matter going into the boot dip, because that will inactivate the chemical as well. So we would recommend that the disinfectant was changed at least twice a week. Another requirement of the prevention zone was to store feed, water, and bedding away from wild birds to reduce the risk of infection.
There's no point in having a nice biosecure chicken coop if you're storing your shavings or your straw in a barn which has access to wild birds because these can defecate on the bedding material and then this can be brought into the chicken coop. It was a requirement to keep water fowls separate from chickens and turkeys, and it was also a requirement that records were kept off the movement of people, birds, and eggs onto and off the poultry holding. Additionally, it was a requirement that birds must not be fed outside, and I think that that should apply to both times when we've got an avian influenza prevention zone and indeed to peacetime, and we don't have avian influenza.
I don't think it's great to be encouraging wild birds to be mixing with either commercial or backyard and flocks of poultry. So, on the 14th of December, a decision was made to put an avian influenza housing order in place. There were 7 cases had occurred prior to that date, and the remaining cases happened thereafter.
So, the only exemptions to housing your birds were if you had a covered range area. So, you can hopefully see on the top photograph that we've got a covered veranda for these birds. So, they basically They've got a roof over it which keeps wild birds out, and they've got meshed sides, and you can see it's snowing in the photo.
And in the bottom photo, you can see that a keeper's got some very fine mesh net to try and give their birds access to a smaller area outside. So that is applicable as long as we can keep Our poultry completely separate from wild birds that they cannot get in and that was acceptable to animal health, and some people get very creative. So in a backyard setting, it's probably quite practical and cost effective to do it, but from a commercial standpoint, it's probably not going to be practical to do it on big farms with large numbers of birds.
One of the challenges, particularly for backyard flocks when we house birds used to free ranging, is to try and minimise stress. So I would encourage keepers in future times when there's housing orders to try and give the birds as much room as possible. And we really want to focus in on the environmental enrichment.
So we can see here in this photograph that we've got some toys, we've got some peck blocks in there for the birds to be pecking at. But part of the problem is that the birds tend to get bored of the environmental enrichment relatively fast. So I would tend to try and rotate your enrichment ideas every week.
So we could be using a peck block one week, we could be using a hung up cabbage the next week, we could be using a bit of rope the next week. So just constantly changing what we're offering the birds to keep them mentally stimulated. It's important not to mix birds together that are not used to being housed together.
I think that's another stress factor, and make sure that we keep our bedding clean and fresh. So bedding's not just there to provide a nice surface for our chickens to walk on and sit on. It's there to provide a substrate for them to dig around in to dust bathe in, and that helps them perform natural innate behaviours which keeps them mentally stimulated and fulfils their sort of emotional and physical needs.
So the next question really that you all might be asking yourself is, well, if we had a housing order in place after the 1st 7 cases, how on earth do we get avian influenza into poultry sheds? So the biggest risk factor for avian influenza to get into poultry sheds is through water ingress. Now, this can be through leaks in the roof.
So you can see here on these poultry sheds that wild birds can easily sit on the roof of the sheds, they can defecate, and whenever it rains, it washes any virus in the faeces in through holes in the roof. Or alternatively, if we get flooding, so rainwater coming in through cracks in the floor, and that can also bring virus into the the poultry coop. Additionally, we can have poor storage of bedding, as I previously mentioned, and also, we can have full mites which can potentially and then bring avian influenza into the coup.
So if, for example, you were to leave a pair of boots sitting outside and then you were to change into them as you get into the, into the poultry coupe, you could potentially bring virus in there on your boots. And indeed of course through the netting over the range area of housed birds, so potentially a seagull or a rook could fly over that covered range area and defecate so that the droppings in the virus would get to the ground below. Once we have a housing order in place, I guess the big thing that then gets asked by all of the keepers, whether the commercial or backyard is when are we going to end the housing order.
So again, DEFRA looked at the risk assessments, looking at the number of cases in our wild birds. They look at the number of cases in poultry, and you'll note that this year there were 2 cases of avian influenza after it was decided to revoke the housing order, but that revocation still went ahead. And we still kept the avian influenza prevention zone in place.
Animal health also look at the wild bird migration. They look at the weather as well, because as the weather warms up, our migratory birds are more likely to leave the UK, and the virus does not persist very well in warm conditions. So avian influenza likes cold, dry weather.
So if we have quite a late spring, then our migratory birds are likely to linger, as is the virus for a longer time and in the environment, and that's also taken into account. And as many of you listening to this webinar will be aware, the housing order ended on the first of April of this year, but the avian influenza prevention zone is still in place, and I'm not entirely sure how long that's going to be in place for. I would imagine at least several weeks more, but it remains to be seen, and animal health will continue to risk assess how long we need the prevention zone in place for.
So I guess the question is, why should we as vets and why should keepers care about avian influenza? Well, as with all disease, it impacts on bird welfare from the point of view of the fact that if they get it, and then they're going to be ill. But also, if we have to have a housing order, it obviously creates some challenges for keepers and for birds of free range flocks.
There's consumer confidence as well. I guess there's always that concern that the media picks up on avian influenza, and I should stress heavily that H5N8 cannot cause disease in humans, but that doesn't mean that the media don't conflate it with things like COVID. Again, there's absolutely no link, but there's always that worry.
There's also economic considerations if we have to house our birds for longer than 16 weeks, then potentially. And our eggs cannot be sold as free range. It can have a massive impact on the exports of dale chicks or of eggs and potentially of genetics across the world.
And indeed there can be quite a lot of impacts in terms of selling poultry meat abroad. So that has a huge impact to the UK on our on our economics. And indeed there's emotional trauma to owners, and whether or not someone's got 5 chickens or 50,000 owners still get very upset and rightly so when their birds are euthanized due to avian influenza, and it's probably even more psychologically difficult if the birds are healthy birds being euthanized as opposed to birds that have got it.
So there's a lot of reasons why we really want to make sure that we That we try and keep AI out and try and do our best to stop it getting into our backyard and commercial flocks. In terms of the lessons learned from this outbreak over 2020 and 2021, I think that obviously there's always the potential for challenges in contacting keepers in the surveillance and prevention zones. So it's really important to try and encourage as many keepers as possible to sign into the Great Britain poultry register.
DEFRA have worked with several publications and organisations to try and get the word out to vets and to keepers about the prevention zone and about the housing order. And it can be challenges, for keepers of waterfowl. It's how you house waterfowl successfully when they normally would be swimming around in a pond, that can cause, some challenges for owners to try and work out how they, how they, house these birds.
We also know that poultry get bored with a single form of enrichment, and as I said, it's very important to try and to go and rotate our enrichment on a weekly basis. Keepers also need to have a contingency plan for housing or poultry, so I guess probably one of the things that all keepers need to do for future winters is make sure that they have a plan that if they have to house their birds, they've got adequate space and the potential to cover the range area if they wish to go down that route. Keepers also need to be aware that if the housing order had lasted longer than 16 weeks, then any free range eggs that they were selling, or indeed meat for that matter, could no longer be classed as free range.
But it's really important to note that we need to sell these rules to poultry keepers rather than bully them. I think we want to try and convince keepers of backyard flocks why they want to go and house their birds during avian influenza outbreaks, rather than tell them they If you don't, you're going to be taken to court, because that's not the right approach to it. It's in everybody's interests that we all follow the rules.
And I guess with COVID this year, people understand that need that it only works if everybody follows the rules, rather than a select few. I think it's also important to make sure that every keeper is using a DEFRA approved disinfectant, so it's all listed on the DEFRA website and there's a link in your notes to the DEFRA website to show which disinfectants are and aren't DEFRA approved. In terms of what happens if keepers don't obey the rules, well, the local authority is responsible for enforcing the rules.
This is not a job for animal health, so if someone is letting their free ranging poultry wander around, it is the responsibility of the local council to enforce the housing order, not animal health. And normally what happens is that animal health will come and visit the the holding, and then they will have a chat with the owner or they will write them a letter. That tends to be the preferred route rather than prosecution.
And as far as I'm aware, I think that anybody that's had a letter or been visited by animal health has tended to then comply with the rules. I don't think there's ever been the need to take them to court. People tend to be quite compliant with it.
And I think that that draws our webinar on the outbreak of avian influenza H5N8 for the winter of 2020, 2021 to a close. So I'd like to thank you all for listening to today's webinar. And as I said before, there's a comprehensive set of notes to go along with the webinar, and there's some quiz questions and answers that are made available to you as well.
Thank you very much.
