COLUMBUS, Ohio – Nobody here but us chickens.
And now, not even that.
Amid an outbreak of avian flu that has devastated poultry flocks in other states, the Ohio Department of Agriculture on Tuesday canceled all duck, rooster, goose and chicken shows in 2015 in the hope that the ban will keep the highly contagious disease out of Ohio.
That means that the Ohio State Fair and all county and independent fairs won’t have poultry shows. And the country’s largest poultry exhibition — the Ohio National Poultry Show — also won’t happen. That show, held in November at the state fairgrounds in Columbus, attracts 6,000 to 7,000 entries a year.
READ MORE: In the Columbus Dispatch
The state fair normally hosts nearly 4,000 poultry entries each year in its junior and open shows. Poultry-swap meets also have been banned for the year.
Director David Daniels acknowledged the decision would prevent young people in 4-H and other organizations from showing birds at fairs, which he admitted would be a disappointment.
“The right move isn’t always the easy move, but this is the right move, especially when you see just how devastating the virus has been to other big poultry states like Iowa and Minnesota. Ohioans need to do all we can to ensure that we protect our industry and that we help avoid a costly spike in the price of important foods like chicken, turkey and eggs,” he said in a statement announcing the ban.
Ohio is the second largest egg producer in the country, the poultry industry employs more than 14,000 people and contributes $2.3 billion to the state’s economy, Daniels said.
The flu, which can wipe out entire flocks, has not shown up in Ohio but is present in surrounding states. It has not been linked to any human illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The virus first showed up in the U.S. in late 2014 and, as of last Friday, 44.7 million birds, including 29 million in Iowa, had either died or been killed to prevent the flu’s spread, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.