sad news - all commercial poultry kept inside

[aberlemno]

Doh - who typed "ability"? "Powers" I meant to type.

[ms]

Stands to reason that sooner or later theres going to be a big epidemic of disease amongst the insanitary and over populated poultry population , who are regularly fed antibiotics to counteract their unnatural living conditions. The birds are probably better culled, than living in their present conditions, crammed in cages with no room to move , groom, interact or scratch.
Check out www.ciwf.co.uk.

[pip]

Sorry, ms, this is back to front.

It is the free range birds that are at risk from catching the flu from wild birds. Birds kept indoors are not at risk.

[sharon]

How true for the intensively reared poultry MS, but the free range one's at least try to give the birds a better life.

Personally I choose not to eat meat and wish I could be a vegan, but sadly I socialise a lot and am selfish in thinking I would be pest to feed at most social occasions, its bad enough being veggie.

But people want cheap meat; especially chicken, and most choose not to read articles which reveal how it has to be produced to satisfy their wants, unless they pay more and get locally produced free range. The Daily Mail recently ran some articles on broiler chickens and I tried to get some chicken eating friends to read it, they said they did not want to know about how it was produced - what hope is there?

If we stiffen up our rules in the UK, I am not convinced that this helps, it makes it tougher for our farmers with unfair competition.

My work takes me to a poultry farm on occasions, they 'grow' (god I hate that expression) broilers, and from what I see their birds get it as good as it can be, but who is to say in Brazil or South Africa that the same standards such as the Assured Chicken scheme are met?

[sharon]

I understand that Pip, but surely with the amount of pheasants etc around broiler houses the ventilation will introduce disease?

Not sure about this though.