How do you think chickens live? I’m talking here about the ones that are reared for meat rather than the ones that lay eggs, because there is a difference. In farmyards, scratching around in the straw? Wandering around fields having dust baths? Afraid not! Today’s ‘broilers’ (an American word meaning to ‘grill’, as in cook) are crammed 20,000 to 100,000 or more in one shed and never see so much as a ray of sunlight.

Imagine a huge shed with wood shavings or chopped-up straw on the floor and not a window anywhere. When the day-old chicks are first put in, there seems to be plenty of room, with the little balls of fluff running around everywhere, eating and drinking from the automatic troughs. The bright lights stay on the whole time, apart from the half-an-hour in every 24 when they are turned off. This isn’t so the chicks can have a nap. It’s because if they never see darkness and the lights go off accidentally because of a power cut, they panic and some might be crushed to death.

Seven weeks later, just before they’re killed for meat, these little chicks have been tricked into growing at twice the speed they would naturally. The constant light is part of the trick, making them eat much longer and much more that they would normally. So is the food they’re given. It is unnaturally ‘high in protein’, making them put on weight – and it often contains ground up bits of other chickens.

Think of the same shed now, with the chickens fully grown. Each bird weighs an amazing 1.8 kg and has only as much space as a computer screen. You can hardly see the straw and wood shaving, which is just as well because it hasn’t been changed since the first day and is now soaked with seven-weeks’-worth of droppings. The chickens have grown so fast that they still ‘tweet’ like baby birds and their eyes are still blue like babies but their size is the same as an adult bird.

If you look carefully you’ll see that some birds are dead. Others are not bothering to eat or drink but just sit and pant. This is because their hearts can’t pump enough blood to feed their huge bodies. The dead and dying are collected and disposed of every day. According to the farmer’s magazine, Poultry World, around 12 per cent of all chickens die like this – 72 million every year – before they even reach the slaughterer’s knife. And the number is increasing all the time.

There are also things that you can’t see. You can’t see that their food always contains an antibiotic medicine which these chickens need every day to ward off the diseases which would spread like wildfire in such overcrowded conditions. You can’t see that four out of five have broken bones or deformed feet and legs because their bones aren’t strong enough to carry their huge weight. And you can’t see that many of them have burns and blisters on their legs, feet and breasts.

These are ulcers caused by the ammonia in their droppings. It is unnatural for any animal to spend its life standing on its own droppings, and ulcers are just one of the results. Ever had little ulcers on your tongue? Painful aren’t they? Well these poor birds are often covered in them.

In 1994, 676 million chickens were killed in Britain, and almost all of them lived in these awful conditions because we’re told, people want cheap meat. It is a similar story in the other European Union countries. In the USA, six billion broilers are killed each year, 98 per cent of which are factory farmed in the same conditions I’ve just talked about. But when were you or your folks last asked if you wanted chicken meat that cost less than tomatoes and involved such cruelty? Unfortunately, scientists are still looking for ways to make them put on weight even faster so they can kill them sooner. The faster they grow, the worse for the chicken but the more money the producers make.

It isn’t just chickens either that spend their whole lives in overcrowded sheds, it’s the same for turkeys, and for ducks for that matter. If anything, it’s even worse for turkeys because they’ve still got many of their natural wild instincts, so their captivity is even more stressful.

I bet you think a turkey is a waddling white thing that looks like an extra from the Hammer House of Horrors. Well, a turkey is really a very handsome bird, with black wing and tail feathers that shine red-green and copper, and a white bar across their wings.

Turkeys still live wild in some parts of the USA and South America. They roost in trees and nest on the ground but you have to be very quick to catch one, as they can fly at up to 88 kilometres an hour and can keep this speed up for over a kilometre-and-a-half. Turkeys wander far and wide looking for seeds, nuts, grasses and small crawly things to eat. The great fat creatures produced for our tables, that can’t fly and can barely walk, have been created by producers determined to make them bigger and meatier.

Not all baby turkeys (or poults as they’re called) are reared like chickens in the completely artificial environment of broiler sheds. Some are put in pole barns, which do have natural light and ventilation. But even in pole barns the growing poults have almost no space and the floor still becomes a soaking mess.

It’s much the same story for turkeys as it is with broiler chickens – the growing birds suffer ammonia burns and constant doses of antibiotics, as well as heart attacks and pain because their legs can’t support their huge weight. The crowded conditions lead to stress and boredom, and as a result the turkeys peck each other. Producers have developed a way of stopping the birds from harming each other in this way – they slice the end of their beaks off with a red-hot blade when they’re just a few days old. In the wild or when there’s enough space around them, turkeys don’t peck each other in this way.

Some of the most pitiful turkeys are the ones kept for breeding. They can grow to the huge weight of six stone and have such diseased hip joints that they can barely walk.

Doesn’t it seem strange that when people sit down for Christmas dinner, to celebrate peace and forgiveness and all the better things in life, they do it by first cutting something’s throat and killing it? When they ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and say what a lovely turkey they’re munching into, they close their eyes to the pain and filth that was its life. And when they carve its huge breast they probably don’t even know that this great lump of flesh has turned turkeys into freaks. We have produced a creature that can’t even mate without us doing it for them using artificial insemination. Not a very merry Christmas for them!