The pictures of dead chickens began to arrive in Lee Grant’s inbox two weeks ago, each of them dropping with an eerie ‘ping’.
One showed a twisted pile of a dozen birds on the floor of a barn, next to a heap of sawdust. Another depicted a feathery mound of corpses in the middle of a lawn.
Several photos of what are effectively avian mass graves included close-ups of heads, beaks and combs.
They’d been deliberately arranged next to copies of the previous day’s newspaper in order to prove exactly when the images were taken.
The all-important date in question was August 15. And the birds in these grisly tableaux were victims of a mass cull that saw roughly a thousand pet chickens put to death at dozens of locations across England and Wales in the course of just a few hours. Most of these creatures were rare breeds, some critically endangered.
As for the circumstances that led to their necks being wrung? They are now the subject of an increasingly bitter controversy in which authoritarian Whitehall officials stand accused of driving traditional British varieties of poultry to the verge of extinction.
It’s an act that typifies Labour’s enthusiasm for over-regulation and deafness to rural concerns, which is threatening our future food security.
To understand why, we must wind the clock back 24 hours earlier, to discussions between Lee Grant and senior officials from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
Defra takes a more draconian approach to bird-flu regulation than almost any of its European counterparts and has imposed a poultry lockdown that has affected the Poultry Club charity
Adam Henson, the presenter of the BBC’s Countryfile, says while he takes no strong view on government policy, bird-flu prevention measures have hit his Cotswold Farm Park
Grant is president of the Poultry Club, a venerable charity founded in 1877 that counts His Majesty the King as its official patron.
It represents hundreds of enthusiasts who breed pedigree chickens, ducks, turkeys and geese to enter in competitive shows.
He was speaking to Defra about his club’s forthcoming National Poultry Show, the centrepiece of the amateur chicken-breeding calendar, scheduled to take place in Lincolnshire in November.
The event, staged since Victorian times, is the poultry world’s version of Crufts and, in a good year, attracts 8,000 birds and their owners. Yet, in recent times, its existence has faced severe bureaucratic threats.
In 2020, proceedings were called off due to Covid. Then the Government began to fret about the spread of avian influenza, the disease better known as bird flu. This saw ministers introduce a complete ban on poultry gatherings. The event was cancelled in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Last year, the show went off without a hitch and the nation’s chicken fanciers dared to dream of a return to normality.
But with a number of new cases detected on farms this summer, Defra, which takes a more draconian approach to bird-flu regulation than almost any of its European counterparts, decided to impose yet another poultry lockdown.
The upshot of all this is that, while there are no known instances of avian influenza being spread at a poultry show in Britain, enthusiasts have now been denied a chance to indulge in their hobby for five of the past six years.
What’s more, hobbyists have been left with large numbers of pure-bred birds – and nothing to do with them.
Such flocks cost significant amounts of time and money to maintain, yet in the absence of shows or trade serve no real purpose (you only need a handful to breed the following year’s stock).
So, in the days that followed the national show’s cancellation, huge numbers of rare-breed birds, many of which would in a normal year be sold or given away to fellow attendees at such events, were instead disposed of.
‘As a direct result of Defra’s actions, there was a mass cull of pure breeds because they had nowhere to go,’ Grant tells me. ‘I estimate there are now 1,000 fewer than the week before. An even bigger problem is that it has now got to the stage where many people have had enough.’
Therein lies a problem. For even before last month’s cancellation, bird-flu lockdowns had been having a devastating impact on the number of active breeders.
Poultry Club membership has declined from 1,200 to 600 in the past five years, while the 2024 show attracted fewer than 2,000 birds, down from 7,000 in 2019.
Grant says many remaining breeders will simply quit. ‘The latest Defra decision will be the final nail in the coffin for many of the last remaining keepers of native breeds of poultry in the UK.’ If so, the fallout could affect all of us.
That’s because modern farming is reliant on so-called ‘hybrid’ chickens, created by cross-breeding ancient native varieties. These birds have been carefully bred to achieve characteristics from disease resistance to prolific egg production, which help producers keep supermarket shelves full.
To create the hybrids of the future, the agricultural industry needs rare breeds to survive.
‘If farmers start to get a problem with a hybrid strain or want to improve it to cope with different conditions caused by, for example, climate change, they’ll need to go back to pure breeds,’ explains Grant. ‘If we allow them to die out, we are endangering our food security. It’s a serious problem Defra seems unable to grasp.’
A database of rare chicken breeds compiled by the Poultry Club makes for sober reading. There are 52 breeds with fewer than 80 females in existence. Some, including the Brakel, Breda and Marsh Daisy, have fewer than 30 living specimens. Ancient bloodlines could be wiped out by a couple of hungry foxes in the wrong place.
If bird flu posed an immediate threat to human health, Defra’s draconian poultry lockdowns might, of course, be justified.
Yet the risk to people who come into contact with infected birds remains tiny. With the virus now endemic in wild bird populations, most breeders argue chickens play little role in spreading it.
‘Defra is so risk-averse it’s unreal,’ says John Messenger, a show judge who breeds Oxford Old English Game chickens. ‘The idea that if we held a show it would endanger members of the public who came to look is quite absurd.’
Jon Grubb, a Poultry Club trustee, points out that there has never been a recorded case of bird flu spreading at any poultry show in the UK. Meanwhile, millions of wild ducks and geese that migrate to the UK for the winter still fly in from countries where shows are currently allowed.
Asked to explain its position, Defra said in a statement: ‘We are seeing increasing outbreaks of avian influenza, particularly in coastal counties like Lincolnshire, with infections recorded in over 69 premises in England so far. We will not take unnecessary risks when it comes to biosecurity.’
Such ‘risks’ seem not to concern the UK Health Security Agency. It says: ‘Based on the latest evidence, the current risk to the UK human population from the avian influenza virus remains very low.’
In America, where there have been 70 cases of bird flu in humans but only one death, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there is ‘zero’ risk of person-to-person spread and the risk to public health is ‘low’.
Defra’s own 30-page ‘risk assessment’ of the likelihood of bird flu spreading at poultry shows, which was carried out in July, also concluded the threat posed by such events was ‘low’.
Critics say this makes the ministry’s decision to impose a ban anyway fatally flawed. I understand that, as a result, some breeders are seeking a judicial review, with a ‘pre-action protocol’ letter set to drop through the Department’s letterbox this week.
Adam Henson, the presenter of the BBC’s Countryfile, says while he takes no strong view on government policy, bird-flu prevention measures have hit his Cotswold Farm Park, a visitor attraction.
Photograph of dead chickens sent to Lee Grant. They’d been deliberately arranged next to copies of the previous day’s newspaper in order to prove exactly when the images were taken
Sign erected on UK farmland by the authorities in controlling the spread of an outbreak of avian flu in parts of southern England
‘We used to have 15 varieties of poultry,’ he says, ‘but because we kept being told to shut them away indoors, which meant people couldn’t actually see them, we have slimmed that down to just three breeds. It’s sad.’
Others are less diplomatic. Professor Angus Dalgleish, the prominent oncologist and expert in virology, tells me: ‘The bottom line is that you cannot control this disease in chicken by lockdowns because bird flu is endemic, so it’s completely ridiculous to follow this policy. As for the effect on rare species, that is another disaster that will one day come back to haunt us.’
Dr Richard North, a former environmental health officer, makes a similar case. ‘Bird flu is impossible to contain,’ he says. ‘But it’s also a virus. When you infect people or animals with a virus you will eventually get herd immunity. We need to learn to live with bird flu, but Defra is now doing the exact opposite in ways that are quite dangerous. My contempt for them is immeasurable.’
Dr North argues governments have been ‘crying wolf’ about bird flu since 2005, when an outbreak in Asia caused the World Health Organisation to predict it could kill between 2 million and 7.4 million people. Back then, the UK government stockpiled the Tamiflu vaccine at vast expense, with the then Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, saying a mutation that could kill tens of thousands was ‘now a biological inevitability – no longer a matter of “if” but “when”.’
Tony Blair believed him – a decision he came to regret. In his memoir, the former Prime Minister reflected on the fact that those ‘astonishing headlines of impending doom’ never came to pass, saying, ‘There is a whole PhD thesis to be written about the “pandemics” that never arise’.
Two decades on, with a new bird-flu scare forcing them to kill their treasured rare-breed birds, the nation’s beleaguered poultry fanciers would doubtless agree.
