I feel like this story is a great example of how its easy to come up with ad hoc justifications. After you decide to do something, it's quite easy to find evidence for your perpsective and justify standard practice.
At the point that there is such a huge variation in practice, for most of these steps, I can't imagine that they are very significant/important. The two systems are made to sound like there is significant justification for each step, which protects one from the shortfalls of other steps, but I can imagine that a combinatorial approach for each of the requirements would work just as well.
Then again, I don't know anything about hens. Just my thoughts.
> At the point that there is such a huge variation in practice, for most of these steps, I can't imagine that they are very significant/important.
It seems a little premature to jump to that conclusion. The US and Great Britain are entirely different countries with different geography, climate, history, culture, laws, economies, etc.
Farming doesn't exist in a vaccum. It's affected by all of that, so it stands to reason that those things will influence policies and practices.
What I found interesting about the article was that while each system was different, each was internally cohesive. Trying to cherrypick one facet of one country's system and applying to the other would almost invariably make things worse. You have to understand the entire system.
That's an important lesson to keep in mind when we constantly read articles like "Country X does Y and it makes Z B% better so we should too!" We need to always remember that X is doing Y in some context that likely matters deeply.
Smart comment. It's like each country is an ecosystem, which has evolved procedures that work. Still, each could be informed by the other. Presumably at the annual "International Conference on Egg Hygiene and Fowl Maintenance".
> It seems a little premature to jump to that conclusion. The US and Great Britain are entirely different countries with different geography, climate, history, culture, laws, economies, etc.
I would say that there is also significant intra-country variation. I have a hard time imagining that there isn't some part of the US where conditions are not similar to the UK. At the point that these regulations work for these locales, I don't see compelling evidence that it wouldn't work elsewhere.
My argument isn't that there isn't culture, climate, or a variety of other factors that influence how things are done - rather, at the point that there is variation, but they all generally work, I have a hard time imagining each of them are important.
> What I found interesting about the article was that while each system was different, each was internally cohesive.
Hence the idea that these narratives are contrived. If we look at any system (that works/is real), there is internal consistency. It is very easy to point to any particular aspect of the system, and say that it is crucial/unique/signifantly valid and valuable.
I would say that this argument is very similar to creationism arguments that the universe's constants/parameters are uniquely functional because we are here. I'm not saying it can't be true, but it seems like a logical fallacy to presume that a particular aspect causes the system in place.
It's also interesting in that even taking such a 'mundane' topic such as the sale of eggs, there can be widely diverging opinions and practices around how they are handled.
Now compare eggs to something more complex and broader in scope like healthcare, taxes, etc and it really makes you wonder how we ever come to agree on anything.
I guess it's a question of where you draw the line on important. If the FDA required hen vaccination around 100,000 few people would get a fairly serious sometimes lethal disease at the additional cost of around 4 cents an egg. If the FDA did nothing I suspect far more than 100,000 people would get seriously ill.
My point was more that your 4 cents per egg was (apparently) wrong by a factor of ~90.
Do you have reason to doubt the $0.14 per hen quoted in the article? I'm interpreting the $0.14 as the incremental cost of vaccinating the birds, is that the wrong interpretation?
Is the article flat out wrong?
On the contrary, I think it's interesting that two different standard practices evolved in different directions, and that with a scientific look at them, we can understand why they're both effective for different reasons.
At the point that there is such a huge variation in practice, for most of these steps, I can't imagine that they are very significant/important. The two systems are made to sound like there is significant justification for each step, which protects one from the shortfalls of other steps, but I can imagine that a combinatorial approach for each of the requirements would work just as well.
Then again, I don't know anything about hens. Just my thoughts.