It comes as no great surprise that the first case of H5N1 bird flu in Britain was found at one of Bernard Matthews 57 factory farms in Suffolk.
Matthews established his first turkey farm in 1950 borrowing the industrialisation processes from American farmers who had based their initial intensive farming on practices perfected by the Nazi concentration camps in World War II.
These places are hellholes. When I was an active member of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), we regularly used to "assess" battery farms across Britain. By some distance, Matthews' farms were the worst turkey farms in the land. The birds exist in squalor; cannibalism is rife; dead birds are removed from time to time by the dehumanised minimum wage workers from Southern and Eastern Europe but not until after extensive suffering (being pecked to death by your own kind is a speciesist equivalent of living in the Third World). Towards death, the sheds are so over-crowded that a peculiar wave of creatures occurs as the birds battle to be able to place their feet on unavailable ground.
Simply, Bernard Matthews is a psychopath (for justification, see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/01/psychopathic-personality-disorder.html). In 100 years time, people like Matthews will be rightly reviled. He abuses everybody and everything in his powers to achieve indecent profit. 8 million birds die every year so that he can live in his big house. For the 160,000 animals who will be culled as a result of DEFRA finding bird flu in Britain, death will come as a release. Life is misery.
It's up to everyone to make their own choices on what they choose to eat but why anybody would select the products of Bernard Matthews is beyond me. The meat is sub-standard as the birds are excessively stressed; the industrialised automation provides numerous loopholes for disease; the workers are mistreated; the end product is a pale imitation of free range and organic meat where the animals have at least been given the respect of a life of sorts prior to slaughter.
The British establishment gave this mass murderer a CBE in December in return for some tokenistic input he gave to the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme. Well, that makes up for the deaths of a quarter of a billion (that is 250,000,000) birds, I suppose.
Apart from the immediate culling, the close focus of government and veterinary professionals and the inevitable negative impact on Bernard Matthews Farms as a business, the man should be aware that the ALF (and other groups) may well be focusing on his operation with renewed vigour.
There may be trouble ahead...
NB. Matthews' products generally include his name on the packaging of drummers, mini kievs, turkey escalopes, pastry lattices and slices, Norfolk turkey breast, wafer thin turkey ham, blt and tikka sandwiches plus roast and oven ready full or part bird. What happened to turkey twizzlers?
