It takes a lot to make me have sympathy for Bernard Matthews, whose company represents everything that’s worst in industrial food production, both the way they rear the turkeys and the revolting processed foods that they make from them. But I did get a twinge of sympathy when bird flu started killing all their turkeys.
I’ve got over that now.
The breeding ground for new strains of flu seems to be mass poultry production facilities around the world where huge numbers of birds are reared together in close contact with people. Ironically though, this outbreak isn’t going to do the free-range chicken industry any good. A chicken free to roam is a chicken free to expose itself to, and spread, infection. Perhaps if all the world’s chickens were reared in low-density, free-range conditions, the problem wouldn’t have started, but it’s too late for that now. And as far as I can gather from what they’re saying on the news, if H5N1 gets established here, free range will be thing of the past.