Commercial turkey housing creates serious welfare problems through overcrowding and barren environments. Understanding turkey behavioral needs guides welfare-positive housing improvements.
Turkey housing welfare suffers from the same combination of overcrowding and environmental barrenness that afflicts broiler chicken production. Commercial turkeys, despite their health limitations from extreme genetics, still show motivation to explore, forage, and engage with environmental features when available. In barren sheds, these motivations are frustrated with no outlet. Pecking behaviors redirect toward pen-mates, causing injurious feather and tissue damage. Lower stocking densities and enrichment materials including straw bales, pecking objects, and low-level perches reduce injurious behaviors and increase welfare-positive activity. Breed selection toward slower-growing strains that are physically capable of more movement is the most fundamental reform available.