Sadly, this region is also home to the largest concentration of the state’s estimated 9 million pigs, 830.8 million chickens raised for meat, and 32.5 million turkeys — most confined and caged without any hope of evacuation. These animals are far too often the forgotten victims of natural disasters since most reports on the agricultural damage focus almost exclusively on economic losses.
We at Farm Sanctuary saw this first-hand in the days after Hurricane Katrina when we arrived on the scene in rural Mississippi. There, we faced demolished warehouses confining tens of thousands of chickens, fields littered with dead birds alongside living ones struggling to survive, and mass graves. We were able to rescue 725 chickens during that effort, but millions more had already perished.