Document type: article from The Conversationwebsite
Author: Frédéric Keck
Preview: One reason why the French President might have chosen to avoid the word "confinement" (the French term for lockdown) in his addresses to the nation on 12 and 16 March, despite the fact that it was used extensively by the Ministers of Health and the Interior, might have been that this term had, until that time, been used in France only to refer to animals.
When the bird flu arrived in Europe in 2005, any poultry farms suspected of being contaminated with the H5N1 virus or at risk of infection from wild birds were "confined", i.e. a boundary was drawn inside which all movement was prohibited for several months. The ethnologist Vanessa Manceron has studied from the inside the violence imposed by this confinement on farmers who found themselves locked down with their animals and stigmatised as plague carriers.
More generally, industrial-scale livestock farming has, over the last forty years or so, led to the confinement of animals in closed buildings. Here, genetic standardisation to drive up profitability leaves them vulnerable to outbreaks of infectious disease. When this occurs, welfare standards become difficult to apply, leaving only a few hours a day when the animals are allowed to leave the the unit in which they are confined.
