Unpalatable truth about your supermarket duck - Raised 10,000 to a shed with no water to paddle in... after an outbreak of bird flu, we reveal why the RSPCA hasn't approved ANY farm behind the booming food trend 

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For those who enjoy being served good food, the sight of a delicious duck à l’orange or succulent confit is sure to whet the appetite.

Nothing like duck conjures up images of a life well lived, of an animal happily foraging on the water, dabbling in the reeds under an open sky. It’s one of the reasons we ate 14 million of them last year.

But if your dinner host bought the bird at a British supermarket, you can wipe those thoughts from your mind. In all likelihood, your duck never saw sunshine or even got its feet wet.

In fact, a bizarre argument is raging in the fowl industry over the most astonishing question: whether ducks need water.

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Crammed: An indoor duck-rearing farm. As sales of the meat soar, questions arise over the birds' welfare

The spotlight was thrown on the standards of UK duck farms a few days ago, when 6,000 ducks were culled due to an outbreak of the H5N8 strain of bird-flu virus at a Cherry Valley facility in Yorkshire.

And you may be surprised to learn that while there are guidelines, there is no legislation — either British or European — to govern the way ducks are farmed. This means the industry is largely free to set its own standards — and those standards don’t involve letting ducks get into water.

As a result, not one single duck on sale in the UK is allowed to carry the RSPCA’s ‘Freedom Foods’ logo, which guarantees that it was farmed to the animal charity’s recommended standards of welfare.

Britain’s major supermarkets have enthusiastically embraced the Freedom Foods campaign, bringing us higher standards across the board, from free-range eggs to free-range pigs and chickens.

But when it comes to ducks, there are simply no Freedom Foods-approved birds out there.

‘I don’t buy duck at all in the UK, and I would encourage others to do the same,’ says Dr Marc Cooper, the RSPCA’s duck-welfare expert.

‘You can’t buy duck reared to high enough standards to be satisfactory, because they simply aren’t given access to the water they need.’

The row over water centres on just how much of it ducks should be allowed access to. Freedom Food guidelines say they should have ‘full body access to open water’.

A case of bird flu - the first in the UK since 2008 - was confirmed at a duck breeding farm this week. There is now a six mile exclusion zone around the Yorkshire farm

Yet the industry insists that ducks need only have enough in which to dunk their heads.

In mass-rearing systems, the conditions are, of course, very different to those enjoyed by ducks in wild. There are as many as 10,000 birds in a single barn, with around four ducks packed into every square metre.

Bearing in mind the birds’ wingspans are around 1.5m, things can get extremely cramped.

And rather than eating insects, worms, roots and seeds, which they would forage for in the wild, farmed ducks are usually given high-protein commercial feed to speed their path to maturity.

Often their enclosures are lit artificially, so during their six or seven-week lifespan, the birds never see the sky or feel the sun on their feathers.

And crucially, they can’t immerse themselves in water.

Experts say that when ducks don’t get enough water to splash about in, they can display physical and psychological problems. ‘Access to water underpins much of the birds’ natural behaviour,’ explains Dil Peeling, a vet who works for the campaign group Compassion in World Farming.

‘Water not only stimulates them to preen more actively, keeping their feathers in good condition, but without it they are less active.

‘As their normal behaviour is frustrated, there’s a higher risk they will start pecking at other birds’ feathers or even wound other birds — referred to as “cannibalism”.’ (Though they don’t actually eat each other.)

Lack of water isn’t the only issue, adds Dr Peeling. ‘Leg problems can occur in all strains of ducks but are more pronounced in heavier and fast-growing birds like these. Chronic leg problems are a concern, as is spraddle leg, where tendons pull the legs in the wrong direction, forcing them apart.

‘We see lameness problems at their worst where the litter is wet, the birds are overcrowded and the environment does not stimulate movement.

‘Most UK ducks for the table are of the Pekin variety, which are descended from mallards. In the wild, they’d be more active and spend more time on the water, paddling and dabbling, so they’d have more of an opportunity to exercise their limbs.’

There are recommendations and guidelines from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and from Europe, but nothing legally enforceable as regards duck welfare. ‘This means that only the lowest standards have to be applied, and they often are,’ says Dr Peeling.

‘In terms of factory-farming, these animals are simply not suited to being intensively farmed.’

15,000 ducks are culled from a duck farm in Kamperveen, The Netherlands, on November 22. Bird flu was found in several poultry farms through out the country

Yet this appears to be exactly what is happening.

There are only two major producers of duck in the UK, Gressingham Foods and Cherry Valley Farms, based in Suffolk and Lincolnshire respectively.

Gressingham supplies whole ducks and duck parts to most of Britain’s supermarkets, while Cherry Valley focuses on ready meals and supplying Chinese restaurants.

Both producers are adamant that their levels of welfare meet the highest standards — yet neither qualifies for a Freedom Foods logo.

The reason for this discrepancy is that each supports two other welfare-assurance schemes, which were set up by the industry and have different standards from the RSPCA.

The first, created by the British Poultry Council — the trade association for poultry producers — is called the Duck Assurance Scheme and is rigorous in many respects.

However, when it comes to providing water for ducks, it states: ‘Ducks must be provided with water facilities sufficient in number and designed to allow water to cover the head and be taken up by the beak so that the duck can shake water over the body without difficulty.’

All parties agree that this is the bare minimum required to prevent ducks’ noses and eyes from becoming crusted and sore.

But there is no insistence that ducks should be able to get into water from head to webbed foot. To do so would mean the introduction of costly equipment and extra cleaning work.

The second code of practice is the Red Tractor Assurance Scheme. The Red Tractor website reveals that it is owned and funded by the food industry, though it insists it is independent of it.

Despite this independence, it announced in September 2012 that it was adopting the Poultry Council’s Duck Assurance Scheme. So, no chance of a Red Tractor-assured duck getting its feet wet — except from the urine-soaked straw on the concrete floor of the barn in which it will spend its entire life.

I ask the British Poultry Council why ducks can’t be given full body access to water.

It replied: ‘The Duck Assurance Scheme requires ducks to have access to water to be able to dip their heads under, to preen and to allow the ducks to toss water onto their feathers for conditioning. This preening is necessary for the ducks’ general health and particularly for good eye and nostril condition. The British duck companies have worked closely with welfare researchers at Oxford and Cambridge universities, the RSPCA and Defra on the water preferences of ducks. The Duck Assurance Scheme standards reflect the published findings of this research and the experience of the duck producers.’

Not one single duck on sale in the UK is allowed to carry the RSPCA’s 'Freedom Foods' logo, which guarantees that it was farmed to the animal charity’s recommended standards of welfare

Such reassurances, though, do not stop many experts from thinking the guidelines don’t go far enough.

Donald Bloom, emeritus professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University’s department of veterinary medicine, tells me: ‘It is my view that ducks should have full body access to water, and that this improves their health and other aspects of their welfare.’

Meanwhile the RSPCA’s Dr Cooper is at pains to point out that the strict Freedom Foods criteria doesn’t demand that all ducks should be able to swim in a pond.

The code requires them only to have something like a trough 20cm wide and 10cm deep so they can paddle and immerse their heads and bodies in the water. But the industry won’t even give them that.

‘At the end of the day, ducks are water fowl,’ says Dr Cooper. ‘They have evolved and adapted to live on and near water.

‘They have hollow bones, and instead of lungs they have air sacs, both of which aid buoyancy. 

They have interlocking feathers to trap air and further help them float, and they have an oil gland at the base of their tail to waterproof their plumage.

‘They don’t have a beak — they have a bill so they can sift water for food. And, obviously, they have webbed feet. They are designed to be on water. They are genetically programmed to seek out water. But they aren’t getting it.

‘The industry argues that giving ducks access to more water leads to that water becoming contaminated with faeces and to the spread of disease. But it is scientifically proven that if you provide bathing water and clean drinking water, the ducks will always drink from the clean water. Producers should provide both.’

The British Poultry Council says no assessment has been made on the additional cost per duck of providing more water — insisting it is a welfare matter and not one of cost.

But one thing is certain: raising ducks is becoming big business.

Gressingham, a family-owned company run by brothers William and Geoffrey Buchanan, is not obliged to publish profits. But in a newspaper interview last year, William said it produced 130,000 ducks per week.

In a separate interview in Farmers Weekly, he said the company’s turnover was £97 million a year.

‘The ducks are housed in big, open barns — they have lots of fresh water and feed, and fresh straw daily,’ he said.

Cherry Valley Farms is owned by Anatis UK Ltd, whose two directors, David Ireland and Jaithip Kanjanapoo, have addresses in Bangkok, Thailand. Latest accounts show that the company made £8.1 million profit last year, from a turnover of £56.9 million. During that time it sold seven million ducks.

I ask Gressingham and Cherry Valley how they rear their ducks, and why they won’t allow them to get properly wet.

Gressingham replied: ‘Our ducks are reared free-to-roam in large barns, with access to feeders and open water that allows the birds to bathe but not with full body immersion.

‘Research and testing has shown this currently provides the best outcomes for the health and welfare of the flock, as it has been demonstrated that by allowing a flock of ducks full body access to — and therefore defecation in — their drinking water greatly increases the risk of disease and the frequency of birds dying and requiring veterinary intervention.’

Cherry Valley said that it supported the British Poultry Council’s stance on the provision of water and duck welfare.

There is, however, a final irony. Even Britain’s farm-reared ducks get one moment in their lives in which they are fully submerged in the water they’ve been longing for.

The preferred — and legal — method of killing across the industry is to hang the birds upside down on a moving belt that plunges them into a deep water bath, through which runs a lethal electric charge.