A COK Report:
Animal Suffering in the Turkey Industry

 Previous | Index | Next 

Disease

Like other farmed birds, turkeys raised in intensive confinement are vulnerable to a number of infectious diseases. Their vulnerability can be attributed to numerous factors. First, although turkeys are naturally insectivores, on today's factory farms they are fed an unnatural diet of by-products, including meat, sawdust, leather tannery byproducts and even human excrement.(35) Second, turkeys are exposed to stress, toxins, and pathogens from indoor confinement.(36) Third, selective breeding has weakened turkeys' immune systems.(37)

Given their vulnerability to disease, turkeys are given more antibiotics than many other farmed animals.(38) Drugs are also used to increase growth rates. According to the industry handbook, Poultry Science, "drugs are widely used in the turkey industry, for the prevention and treatment of diseases, as well as, in some cases, growth stimulants . . . few flocks are raised without the use of drugs."(39)

The routine use of antibiotics to improve growth rates is believed to make these antibiotics less effective against human disease. Dr. Dennis Wages of North Carolina State University's College of Veterinary Medicine says of antibiotics, "In the court of public opinion, I can defend using something to control necrotic enteritis, but I can't defend it just because it makes the chicken have a little more breast meat."(40)

Some poultry diseases are a direct threat to human health. Avian influenza, for instance, infects both chickens and turkeys, and humans.(41) A World Health Organization report in 2004 speculated that "the next [avian] flu pandemic could infect 25 to 30 percent" of the world's population and "kill up to 7 million" people.(42)

 Previous | Index | Next