Farmed turkeys have been selectively bred for extreme breast meat yield, creating welfare problems analogous to those seen in broiler chickens, on a significant scale.
The welfare situation of farmed turkeys shares many characteristics with broiler chicken welfare problems but receives less public attention despite comparable scale. Turkeys are cognitively complex animals capable of recognizing individual humans, communicating through vocalizations, and forming social bonds. The systematic breeding of these animals to have cardiovascular and skeletal systems that cannot sustain their body weight, followed by slaughter before welfare-relevant health problems become too obvious to ignore, represents a fundamental welfare failure driven by consumer demand for cheap meat.