As North Carolina cleans up from the damage wrought by Hurricane Florence, the scale of the devastation is now coming into focus - including to victims who usually get less attention in disasters like this.

North Carolina's Department of Agriculture last week issued a livestock casualty report: 3.4 million chickens drowned in Hurricane Florence.

That's an eye-popping statistic, but livestock casualties in such numbers are in fact not unusual: Factory farming exists on a much bigger scale than most people realize, and there are often economic incentives to let millions of chickens die or even outright kill them without using their meat.

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