Pity the turkey, for our seasonal goodwill passes it by. Every year, animal-rights campaigners try to alert the public to its nasty fate. And every year, the public ignores them: we eat 35 million turkeys a year, 10 million of them around Christmas time. This year, when Terence the turkey walked three miles from his shed in Hampshire to an owl sanctuary nearby, the nation was touched, but not enough to stop buying.
Such gastronomic tenacity is curious, considering how modern our love affair with turkeys is. They were first imported in the 16th century from their native North America, via Spain and Mexico, but until the 1950s the goose still ruled the British Christmas table – with chicken for poorer families – until mass production kicked in. Today, the turkey industry is worth multimillions. But its profits, say animal campaigners, are built on the usual modern vices – efficiency, cost-cutting, cruelty.
This year’s seasonal tale comes from the animal welfare organisation Viva!, which is opposed to intensive farming and meat-eating. Viva!, only seven years old and not wealthy, says that it can’t afford to take its causes to court. “We took a decision to campaign to the public instead,” says the Viva! director Juliet Gellatley.
They sought to do this recently by sending campaigners armed with video cameras into six turkey factories around Britain, including ones operated by the food giant Kerry Group, which supplies Sainsbury’s and Tesco – and “bootiful” Bernard Matthews. They claim to have stayed for about 15 minutes
in each.
The impressions they came away with from one farm were far from pleasant. “I’ve been to loads of factory farms in my time,” says Gellatley, who was among the raiders. “But this is the worst I’ve ever seen for overcrowding.”
There was no time to count, but Gellatley estimates that in one unit – which Viva! claims is a Bernard Matthews site in Norfolk – there were thousands of birds in one shed, crammed together. “You couldn’t easily walk through them,” says Gellatley. “If a bird wanted to move, it had to scrabble over other birds.”
The picture she paints is not pretty. “They were in a terrible mess,” she alleges. “They had abscesses. We saw blind birds that were being pecked at by other birds. In those conditions, when a bird starts to bleed, the other birds move in.”
Such is factory farming, we may say dismissively. The price we pay. But a visit to a unit run by Kerry Foods at Bawbrugh in Norfolk was no better, says Viva!. “Admittedly, we were there at night-time, and they do let the birds out into a paddock during the day. But what was shocking was that in the free-range unit, there were even more obvious injuries.” One of the five colleagues who accompanied Gellatley claimed that more than half the birds had blood on their feathers from other birds pecking at them (though the dark feathers of the Bronze breed of turkey made it harder to spot). They saw at least 40 birds, they say, that were in such poor condition that they should have been put down; and others that seemed destined to become what the industry calls “starve-outs” – birds that can’t manage to clamber over, or peck through other birds to get to food and water. The official industry mortality rate is 4.5 per cent for hens (females) and 8-9 per cent for stags (males).
The industry is adamant, however, that its practices are not cruel. “The birds get fresh bedding every day,” says Frank Hayes, spokesman for Kerry Foods (producers of Walls, Mattesons and millions of Christmas dinners). “They’re naturally ventilated, and stockmen check them three times a day.” Does he dispute the tale of injured birds, pecked-out eyes and abscesses? “I do. We are a very ethical company, and that site operates to the highest welfare standards.”
Bernard Matthews, likewise, strongly denies Viva!’s assertions. “We have seen the video and we do not accept that this is our farm,” said a spokesperson yesterday, although Viva! claims to have filmed Global Positioning Satellite readings that prove exactly where they were. “We have had confirmation of our standards by Defra [Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs] on 5 December. A recent inspection by one of our biggest clients has confirmed that we operate to high standards.”
Sainsbury’s and Tesco, meanwhile, have both promised to send investigators to the alleged sites. Sainsbury’s statement affirmed its commitment to animal welfare, and to “continually improve standards”. A spokesman for Tesco says: “We have strict codes of conduct for all our suppliers on animal welfare.”
Yet the fact remains that, in the pursuit of cheap food, humans have devised some pretty unattractive industrial practices – and that turkeys have drawn one of agribusiness’s shorter straws.
Turkey farms may indeed conform to Britain’s highest welfare standards. But the standards, say campaigners, are dismal. The Animal Welfare Code has good enough aspirations. In the interests of good stockmanship, turkeys are entitled to “freedom from thirst, hunger and malnutrition; appropriate comfort and shelter; the prevention, or rapid diagnosis and treatment, of injury, disease and infestation; freedom from fear, and freedom to display most normal patterns of behaviour”. And, under the Protection of Animals Act 1911 (Amended 2000), it is illegal to “cause unnecessary suffering to an animal that is being destroyed to provide food for mankind”.
But how to define suffering? Government rules stipulate that, “in broiler-type housing” (the most intensive), each kilogram of bird is entitled to 260 square centimetres. That’s about four birds per square metre. Nor are these spindly chickens: the turkey on your table is the result of decades of breeding for size. Its breast is abnormally huge – to the extent that its skeletal structure can no longer support it, and factory turkeys regularly suffer hip conditions, have difficulty walking and often go lame. In the wild, a turkey likes space. To a flying bird – even a modern bird whose flying ability has been bred out of it – 260 square centimetres per kilogram is the opposite of generous.
For example, according to the industry, turkeys are aggressive, so they need to be kept in low-lit sheds to calm them down. They are angry, difficult birds. Not so, say other breeders and campaigners. Turkeys in the wild are peaceable creatures. “You can get the odd nasty-natured turkey, same as you get the odd nasty-natured person,” says Peter Hayford, chairman of the UK Turkey Club and breeder of rare turkeys. “But mostly they’re OK.”
Turkeys in non-farming situations have strict pecking orders. They have personalities. It may be a bit much to say, as Viva! does, that they have “dark, almond-shaped eyes and sensitive fine-boned faces”, and are “striking and handsome” (the beauty of wattle and gobble is an acquired taste), but any bird that can fly at 88km an hour, as wild turkeys can, may indeed be “graceful and intelligent”.
“The ones I’ve seen in sanctuaries look out for each other,” says Gellatley. “They roost together. They’re friendly, peaceful birds.” Cramped conditions breed aggression, as every prison officer knows. The same goes for turkeys. Their cannibalism, aggression and pecking are a reaction to overcrowding and stress. And despite government regulations, and according to publicly funded research, here is a short list of what else is done to turkeys: the cutting-off of beaks, stunning insufficiently before slaughter, scalding alive, artificially inseminating, and breeding to the point of physical incapacity. Intensively reared turkeys suffer from colisepticaemia, pasteurella and salmonella. The Government’s own Farm Advisory Welfare Council, in a recent report into the British turkey industry, discovered that overcrowding exceeded guidelines by 50 per cent, and that 0.1 per cent of birds were still alive on entering the scalding tank (where they are dunked to make their feathers easier to pluck). That makes 35,000 turkeys a year, boiled alive.
To any lobster-eater, of course, this will be spectacularly unmoving news. So try this: being a modern turkey ? for the minority that get to live beyond three months ? involves getting regularly masturbated by human beings. The industry says that turkeys can’t risk having proper sex any more, because the stags damage the hens. Campaigners say that the stags damage the hens because they’ve been bred into abnormal plumpness. If they mount, the hens collapse. And so the job of turkey masturbator was created: grown men who spend their days tweaking turkeys’ penises for a living, sucking the semen into tubes (it tastes slightly salty, in case you were wondering), then squirting it into females. All in all, a profession that probably sums up the spirit of agribusiness ? a utilitarian ethos that defines animals by their edibility ? turkeys, like chickens, are categorised as “table breeds” or “laying breeds” ? and which assumes, wrongly, that cutting an animal’s nose will not spite its face.
Meanwhile, the turkey industry is spreading its wings. Bernard Matthews, already worth £344m, has expanded its bootiful message into New Zealand, Germany and ? most successfully ? Hungary. The figures of turkey associations in the UK and the US show ever-increasing consumption, even when our celebrity chefs despise the bird (you will look vainly for turkey in Nigella or Nigel). Ninety per cent of Britons will eat turkey this Christmas, a figure that will take some denting.
“Why anyone would want to celebrate the season of peace and goodwill by cooking one of these sad, abused, diseased and dejected animals beats me,” Gellately concludes.
The modern turkey is mostly a human creation, and one of which to be ashamed. And perhaps the best it can hope for, in the face of lax government regulations and an unfeeling industry, is that some of us, tucking into the golden roasted bird later this month, will think to raise a glass and propose a toast to escapee Terence, the turkey who struck out against factory farming everywhere. The one who got away.