European Heat Wave Claims Animal Victims

by Sherry Morse

The current European heat wave, which has already killed more than 100 people in Paris, is also taking a devastating toll on the lives of farm animals across the continent, and affecting the feeding and breeding patterns of wild birds and butterflies.

In France thousands of rabbits, chickens and pigs in the Loire and Brittany regions have died from the heat. It is estimated that more than thirty thousand pigs, mostly young animals, have lost their lives so far.

Jean Dube, director of the Federation Departementale des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles in France said, "Up to three hundred tons of turkeys and chickens have succumbed to the heat."

Dube also said there were too many carcasses for sanitation workers to collect, so farmers have been authorized to bury animals themselves.

Many farmers are trucking in water to their animals rather than relaying on natural streams and ponds as they normally do in the summer.

Farmers whose pastures have been destroyed by the worst drought in eighty years are now feeding their animals with hay that would normally be saved for winter feeding. The French government has also been providing funds to help these farmers buy new hay for their animals where necessary.

It is estimated in France alone that the total cost of lost production, and restocking winter feed, could be as much as a hundred million euros.

In Spain, poultry producers warned that chicken prices would increase because the heat is causing chicks to mature five days later than they normally do. Some chickens have literally broiled alive in the metal sheds that they live in.

Spanish biologist Juan Carlos Atienza said, "Birds are particularly affected because they are small and have a greater surface area to weight and a higher body temperature than humans. If it is very hot, birds don’t fly around during the day, which cuts down on their feeding time." In addition Atienza said that the due to the intense heat there are fewer insects for the birds to feed on.

Rivers and lakes in Europe have also been affected, with some 30,000 eels estimated to have died because of elevated temperatures in the Rhine River.

Marine biologists at the Institute of Sea Sciences in Barcelona, Spain said that wild fish will adapt to the elevated temperatures by swimming lower, but that if the changes lasted for years the effects could be detrimental.

On a more positive note, some birds, like the swift, are breeding and migrating earlier than they normally do, and some butterflies that normally reproduce only once each summer have reproduced three times this year.

© 2003 Animal News Center, Inc.