With Bird Flu, the Chickens Have Come Home to Roost
In Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague, set in the French Algerian town of Oran, rats one day begin showing up dead on residents’ doorsteps, dying with violent spasms and blood pouring from their mouths.
At first, the rats’ death agonies are only a curiosity to the townspeople. But then the rats begin dying in greater numbers, their corpses piling up in the streets. “The staircase from the cellar to the attics was strewn with dead rats, ten or a dozen of them. The garbage-bins of all the houses in the street were full of rats.”
When Dr. Rieux, a physician, remarks upon the strange phenomenon to his mother, she replies vaguely, “It’s like that sometimes.”
By the time Rieux realizes what is happening, it is too late. Bubonic plague has come to Oran. Soon it is the townspeople themselves who are dying in agony, their bodies heaping up in mounds–like the rats whose suffering, and fates, they had only days before viewed with indifference….
Lately, I have been thinking of Camus’ novel, as we ourselves teeter on the brink of a new deadly plague—avian flu. Like the people in the story, we too have remained indifferent to the suffering, and shared collective fate, of our fellow creatures. And we continue to do so at our own peril.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/03/28/with-bird-flu-the-chickens-have-come-home-to-roost/
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