Bill Maher Says Treating Animals ‘Badly’ Has Caused Bird Flu

Bird flu and future pandemics were among topics of discussion on a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.

An audience question read out by Maher was directed to guest Jon Tester, the former Democratic Senator for Montana and a crop and beef farmer. The question was: “Are you concerned about bird flu and the Trump administration’s ability to respond to another pandemic?”

Tester said that “we should learn something from COVID and we should treat these things seriously.” In response, Maher said: “All the diseases come from animals, and it’s because of the way we treat them… badly.”

Tester agreed there “there’s no doubt” that the current bird flu situation is due to the “concentration of livestock in small areas, in this case, chickens.” Bird flu has become a global catastrophe for both wild and farmed animals, spreading rapidly through poultry farms until mutations allowed it to jump to a growing number of species.

Read more: Bird Flu Jumps To Sheep For First Time

Maher said that the cruel conditions that chickens are kept in are to blame for bird flu. “When you torture animals, it winds up coming [back on us],” he said. Maher has been a PETA board member since 1997, though he continues to eat meat.

‘We should deal with it’

Maher asked whether Tester, in his capacity as a Senator, had ever done anything about the way chickens are farmed. do anything about that?

“Look, we have a hard enough time getting a farm bill passed in Congress, for Christ’s sakes, much less dealing with those kind of issues in our food system,” said Tester. The farm bill is a legislative package that expires and is updated every five years in the US. It covers matters such as financial support for farmers and nutrition programs to help low-income families.

“Does that mean we shouldn’t deal with it?” Tester went on. “No, we absolutely should deal with it in common sense ways.” But he said instead, the political conversation ends up fixating on issues like which bathrooms trans people should be able to use.

Currently, the global response to bird flu is focused on containment through killing infected animals and implementing biosecurity measures on individual farms. However, intensive animal farms continue to proliferate across the globe. Experts have warned that countries must start preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic among humans, including developing vaccines and public communication programs.

Read more: First Human Case Of Bird Flu Confirmed In Nevada As New Strain Circulates