Joanna Lumley: Spare a thought for all those turkeys

In between the fear for our health, the victimising of wild birds, the finger-pointing at free-range poultry farmers, and the detective work on the Hungary-Bernard Matthews connection, we've spent scant time thinking about the turkeys whose carcasses are spewing out smoke from the incinerator in Staffordshire.

What I've learnt about intensive turkey farming appals me. So, let's spare a thought for those 159,000 turkeys in particular, and for their cousins, the 20 million turkeys we rear for their flesh each year in the UK. For the birds on that Suffolk factory farm, the end did not come swiftly. Instead, one can only imagine their panic as they were caught by the legs, hauled from their sheds, bundled into the killing crates and their helpless struggle before the gas took hold and unconsciousness mercifully put paid to fear and suffering for good.

This is meant to be the most humane method of mass slaughter for disease control, and less gruelling for the birds than suffocating to death by having the ventilation system shut down.

Let's not forget the turkeys in the shed where the avian flu virus took hold. What agonies did they go through as the deadly infection infiltrated their lungs, their breathing became constricted and even the foul air of the shed became harder and harder to obtain?

And the other 20 million? Perhaps it's as well they are kept in those massive factory sheds behind the concrete and bio-security, the alarm systems and barred gates. This way, we don't get to see them.

As the helicopters fly over the vast sheds, we imagine a clean, sterile "bio-secure" environment down below. We don't watch the turkeys grow at a phenomenal rate and we don't get to witness the struggle for space as eight 11lb birds attempt to share one square metre between them. We don't see the lameness developing as arthritis sets in to their overburdened joints, and we don't smell the ammonia as the wood shavings on the floor get saturated with faeces.

Nor do we get to see the sheds where the breeding turkeys are held, the turkey cocks bred for such huge meaty breasts that they can no longer mount the females and mate naturally. We don't see the employees whose job it is to masturbate these males on a regular basis.

The industry doesn't really like to advertise this horrifying fact. At most, they refer to the turkeys being "milked" for their semen. Maybe it's as well that official advice is that in hot weather these procedures should be conducted in the cooler part of the day. Heat is known to stress turkeys anyway - perhaps heat, plus the manhandling involved in artificial insemination, would be just too much.

These are the real brownie points for factory farms - they allow us to go on buying carefully packaged poultry, a Turkey Twizzler here, a turkey burger there, a reassuring feeling of locally produced food from East Anglia.

The scientific finger is beginning to point to the proliferation and intensity of poultry factory farms as a major factor in the spread of H5N1 and other types of avian flu. The experts now tell us what we might have guessed, that birds in these systems are likely to have weaker immune systems. Couple this with the mega opportunity provided by thousands of birds in one enclosed shed, their bodies waiting to act as hosts for the virus, allowing it to replicate and mutate at an amazing rate, and there's your recipe for a disease disaster.

We know intensive poultry farming has proliferated in south-east Asia and China. And it is in this region that H5NI has taken hold. But not in Laos, which provides an interesting case history. In Laos, poultry farming is still mainly backyard and free range. Only 13 per cent of the industry is intensive. Yet 93 per cent of the H5N1 outbreaks in Laos have been in these intensive farms.

Maybe Bernard Matthews believes his own "bootiful" hype. Maybe he believes he has done a service to the nation in bringing turkey from the feasts of the fabulous few to the dinner tables of the many. I believe he's got it wrong. We must keep our faith in the inherent fairness of the British people. What is going on in our factory farms isn't fair - we're not doing right by the animals. Carry on like this and we're not just hurting other sentient beings, but we're likely to be storing up a disease disaster for humanity.

Isn't it time to wean ourselves off cheap meat at any cost? Isn't it time for a real reflection on the lives of the birds we so casually take for granted? Let's all cut out the cheap turkey and chicken and buy only free-range or organic, where the birds are given a decent life. Let's put windows in those sheds, so we can no longer hide from the grisly horrors they contain.

The writer is a patron of Compassion in World Farming