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Law360 (April 9, 2020, 10:34 PM EDT) -- Amid reports that the novel coronavirus likely jumped from animals to humans, the Humane Society sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday in California federal court, saying it is not doing enough to regulate poultry farms that risk spreading zoonotic diseases to humans.
Although the lawsuit does not specifically target COVID-19, it claims the government's "preferred alternative" method of controlling bird flu and other diseases that spread through poultry threatens the health of humans by not requiring cage-free environments and could lead to "more frequent and more life-threatening pandemics."
The Humane Society of the United States claims that by not preparing an environmental impact statement for its method, the USDA is violating the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, and threatening to violate multiple state and federal laws, including the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.
"Preventing both the creation and spread of highly infectious and lethal disease is of paramount importance and should be a top priority for the federal government," the Human Society said, adding that the USDA instead has "decided to essentially subsidize the dangerous and cruel confinement of billions of birds nationwide, despite being fully aware of the causal connection between dense confinement and the frequency and severity of bird flu outbreaks."
Rather than requiring cage-free environments, the USDA's method calls for mass exterminations of poultry within a 10- to 15-mile radius of any outbreak, the suit says.
According to the lawsuit, avian influenza — commonly known as bird flu — is a virus that can cause varying degrees of clinical illness in chickens, other animals and humans, while highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, is an "extremely infectious and fatal" form of the virus that spreads rapidly.
The Humane Society said it asked the USDA five years ago to consider regulations that animals raised for food or egg production be placed in cage-free low stocking density environments, which it said would help slow the the spread of the bird flu.
Instead, the group said the USDA chose the "preferred alternative" method, which uses practices that are hazardous to the environment and public health, although no proper environmental impact statement was drafted as required under NEPA. The hazardous practices include burying bird carcasses in unlined pits, burning them or using ventilation shutdowns to suffocate and cook the birds to death.
In 2015, after an HPAI outbreak, the USDA issued an environmental assessment of the method and a so-called FONSI statement — or finding of no significant impact — claiming "there would be no significant impact to the human environment from the implementation of the preferred alternative," according to the lawsuit.
The Humane Society said the USDA's analyses of the method "are egregiously insufficient to satisfy NEPA for several reasons, including for failing to sufficiently evaluate reasonable alternatives, inadequately examining the consequences, environmental impacts, and adverse effects of its actions, and failing to prepare an EIS."
The Humane Society is seeking an order for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to prepare an EIS that satisfies the requirements of NEPA and a reversal of the 2015 environmental assessment and FONSI about on the preferred alternative method, among other things.
The USDA and counsel for the Humane Society did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Humane Society is represented by John Gueli, Adam Schwartz, Sam Jolly, Elizabeth Robinson, Daniel Wiener and Sophia Zander of Shearman & Sterling LLP, and Peter Brandt and Laura J. Fox of the Humane Society.
Counsel information for the USDA was immediately available.
The case is Human Society of the United States v. USDA et al., case number 2:20-cv-03258, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
--Editing by Breda Lund.
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