No one was hurt
On how the news covers barn fires
From 2022-2024, over 2.5 million animals died in barn fires in the US. That’s a drop in the ocean when it comes to farm animal deaths, and most of the dead are chickens, so no one really cares. Least of all the media.
The way the local news reports on barn fires always gets to me. A common phrase these articles use is “no one was hurt.” Another is “no injuries were reported.”1
The stories tend to spend more time talking about how heroic the fire department was, or how big the financial loss was, than on the animals that suffered very real injuries before being reduced to ash.
This story about a fire on a pig farm in North Carolina really gets me because it goes straight from casually saying how a thousand pigs were roasted alive to telling us that, “Fortunately, no one was hurt.” How fortunate!
CBS Delaware will run this set of pictures of a burnt to a crisp chicken barn and say “no word if there were any injuries.”
Yes, it’s a total mystery as to whether the 20,000 birds in that barn suffered any injuries.2
Every now and then a ray of empathic light shines through. After a hog barn in Missouri burned down earlier this year, the local news story ended with this line:
No people were harmed in the fire. Unfortunately, some pigs were not able to be saved.
Emphasis mine. It is unfortunate. Good on you for sneaking that in there, reporter Maja Orme.
The worst is when story tries to pull at our heartstrings by talking about the financial losses suffered by the farmers. This one, from a blaze in Canada that killed 27,000 chickens, really pushes that angle.
“It’s a big hit to the farmers, the growers and the chicken industry.” […] “In speaking with the owners this morning, it is a devastating loss for them,” Parker added. “Our thoughts go out to them, this is a devastating large loss.”
It was apparently not worth mentioning the plight of the actual dead chickens. The immolation of sentient, feeling beings is treated as a total afterthought, as if nothing more than a bunch of wax figurines had been melted.
Another common line I see in these stories is “the cause of the fire is under investigation.” It’s never “clearly, another callous farm operator skimped on electrical maintenance.” Meanwhile, in a headline fit for r/nottheonion, the hog farmers say they oppose installing sprinklers in barns because that would be bad for the animals.
And what can you do but laugh to keep from crying when reading the end of this article about a massive barn fire in Minnesota that killed tens of thousands of birds.
Forsman Farms and fire officials had not yet determined the cause of what’s now the second fire at the farm in recent years. The last one in 2022 also killed tens of thousands of chickens.
You’d think one fire that killed tens of thousands of chickens would be a wakeup call, or that they’d be heavily regulated after that. Nah, they just kept right on going until another farm burns down. It’s amazing how often you read one of these stories about 100,000 birds dying and it casually includes a line like “it was the second such incident in the past seven years for Hillandale Farms.” Burning up your living, feeling product from time to time is just the cost of doing business.
But don’t worry, the website for the farm that keeps on having barns burn down in Minnesota assures us they care about hen welfare.
In fact, the whole supply chain cares about hen welfare. A propane tank explosion killing twenty thousand birds at a time doesn’t change that fact. The industry still serves up “Happy Eggs”.
These fires often happen in rural communities and it takes a lot of effort to deal with them. The other day, a fire department in Pennsylvania took to Facebook to thank the 14 (!) other fire departments that helped them put out a barn fire. After a lot of searching, I believe this was a fire at a turkey barn, but I don’t know for sure. Nothing I could find about the incident mentions anything about the animals.
It’s not uncommon for the reporting to be murky on whether any animals were affected by a given fire. At the end of an article about a barn fire in Ohio, the reporter says they “could not confirm whether animals were hurt.” What can they tell us? Only the most important fact:
There were no injuries reported as a result of the fire.
There is a great EA forum post on this topic, titled “no injuries were reported”
There is a small chance the barn was empty, but in the stories I read they usually state when that’s the case.
A good piece. I think here in England news reports do tend to comment on whether animals have died or not—we are a bit more sentimental—but the sympathy is limited.
Thinking about tens of thousands of animals dying in a fire is just horrific, like the firebombing of Dresden. It is a wonder the fire crews and others don’t have some sort of trauma from the sound, smell and sight.