Just this past summer I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to discuss emergency and large-volume livestock carcass disposal with experts nationwide?  Finally, last week, that ominous day came as I attended the National Carcass Disposal Symposium.

As the name suggests, there was a lot of carcass talk, but my favorite part of the symposium was the demonstrations of the many different methods of culling (not to be confused with killing).  The winner of the “culling-method-most-likely-to-show-up-at-county-fairs” is the foam method.  Here’s how it works.

The idea is to use a water source and mix it with the same kind of chemicals that firefighters use when fighting wildfires.  This mixture goes through a pump apparatus that makes the foam that fills the poultry house.  The foam can rise to 4 feet and is dense enough to suffocate the birds in 20 minutes.  The foam, the birds and the waste they’ve been standing in all their lives breaks down and composts inside the poultry house in 3 to 4 weeks.

At the demonstration, I watched these huge loud pumps spew foam and imagined thousands of chickens suffocating underneath the lemon-scented cloud.  The onlookers were then told that one of the many bonuses of using this foam technique is that “the media arrives and sees this white fluffy stuff that smells like citrus!”  Ok, ok.  So you’ve figured out how to cover up all the dead birds, but how do you stop the bedlam when all the journalists revisit their youth and dive into the irresistible foamy bubbles?  Judging by the amount of time I was able to play in the foam, the USDA has not yet addressed this problem.