Image left: Battery hens with hardly enough room to spread their wings.

Foi Gras is perhaps the most expensive form of poultry meat available, and it isn’t only humans that pay a high price, the Ducks and also Geese used endure a horrific and painful life of having a funnel pushed down their throats two or three times a day and are force fed (“by a process called gavage“) such colossal amounts of food enlarge their livers to between six to ten times their natural size.

The process of force feeding has very ancient beginnings that reach back 4,500 years ago to the tables of the Pharoahs of ancient Egypt, until recent years it is considered a delicacy particularly on the continent and the industry is starting to spread earth-wide  and is set to really catch on in Britain if we allow it ! have we not learned how to live with understanding and compassion in all that time ?

In the past these birds were force fed manually, nowadays with the emphasis in greater financial returns some in the poultry farming industry are employing mechanical and pneumatic methods of ramming more and more food down the throats of the unfortunate creatures.

Recent scientific research has hinted that the consumption of Foi gras may be linked to the onset of rheumatoid arthritis and CJD and type II diabetes and who knows their maybe a host of other yet unidentified diseases that it initiates as we only have data from initial studies.

Osteoprosis

This is a disease largely linked to humans and it is highly unusual for it to occur in wild poultry, however since the invention of the battery cages and high densisty houses it has been noted that there is a significant rise in the incidence of this disease occurring in birds unable to get enough natural exercise that keep it at bay.

Image left: Hens scratching in the dust, with room to excersise.

Osteoporosis is a disease where bone density degenerates and is induced by artificial conditions to the point where the birds legs fracture very easily causing excruciating pain, suffering, and death, this is yet another example where humans bring painful diseases upon innocent birds in this case simply by denying them sufficient exercise.

These high density rearing systems are a totally unnecessary affliction of pain and suffering " and why" just to make the industry financially viable.

Bird Flu ( Avian Flu )

This disease is perhaps viewed as the greatest potential threat to human existence next to global warming and has recently sent shock waves all around the globe. There are estimated to be nine kinds of avian flu recognized, the most virulently dangerous kind is classified as H5N1, and which can infect humans. The greatest worry to health authorities is not the virus in its present form, which is only slightly communicable to humans, but the very real possibility that the virus could mutate with a form of human flu giving birth to an organism that is potential lethal to the human masses.

Image left: Chick being tested for deadly avian flu virus.

Fears are rising of the possibility of mutation of the disease and health bodies are determined to eradicate it. In the UK a policy of containing the disease and is implemented by an immediate mass culling regime, this has worked to some extent and thankfully it is making the intensive poultry industry (“which is basically a form of legalized animal abuse” ) not as financially attractive as in recent decades, this and not the realisation of the wrongs that we do to birds by confining them may eventually bring about the end of high density rearing.

There are fears that if H5N1 Avian flu did mutate with the human form it could give rise to a disease that could possibly wipe out the human race. In the 1918/19 pandemic a sub-strain of the flu virus H1N1 ( named Spanish Flu ) killed around 25,000,000 some estimates record that it eventually took the lives of around 50-100 million people worldwide. Wikipeadia states that H1N1 possibly killed 1,000,000 a week in the first 25 weeks. These days with humans living in greater density the death toll could be catastrophically higher, this is the kind of pandemic that government health agencies are determined to avert.