Do you want to hear the truth about bird flu and the H5N1 strain? Or do you prefer the Hammer Horror version? This is the one that preys on human sensibilities and neuroses, the one that feeds on the 21st-century human’s deep-rooted fear of everything wild. It is the chilling tale of the pigeon in the ventilator shaft: the deadly bird that flew into the safe and civilised farm and spread a demonic and dreadful disease to the fat, peaceful and contented fowls that gabbled and gobbled contentedly beneath, unaware of their imminent and dreadful fate.

The real truth is staring us in the face, but it’s not nearly so much fun. The fact is that investigations, including those carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, show quite clearly that it is the large poultry companies that have been responsible for past outbreaks. Example: the outbreak in Nigeria was caused by the import of poults — young birds — from China. Not migrating birds, no.

The best way to encourage and spread a good disease is to move infected beings around a good deal and to keep them in unnaturally warm and crowded conditions. Two examples: the Tube in London and the poultry trade. The poultry business involves constant movement of birds, and the conditions in the factory “farms” are pretty much like living on the Tube for 24 hours a day: it is a short and deeply horrible life.

When the virus spread across SouthEast Asia, it did not do so along the migration routes of wild birds. It followed the railways and the main roads. Who is more likely to take the train, I wonder: a wild bird or a chicken? Bit of a puzzle, eh?

No, this is an industry problem; a business problem; a money problem. So naturally, it makes good sense to blame the wild world outside and carry on making money.

One strange thing about the H5N1 strain of this virus: it is extraordinarily virulent, which is highly unusual. Under normal — that is to say, wild — circumstances, a virus, in order to survive, must become less virulent. After all, killing off your host is counter-productive for any parasitic organism. The process of becoming less virulent is what tends to happen — must happen — in any circumstances, save in the case of a very dense population to which there is constant artificial recruitment. The poultry trade to a T.

Diana Bell, a conservation biologist and expert on wildlife disease, summed up: “We have created a monster that doesn’t know the rules.” But the fact that this is a problem of the trade, rather than one of the wild world, has its cheerful side. The poultry trade is about control: therefore, if there is a will to do so, the virus can be controlled. It can be — must be — stamped out while it is still an industrial rather than a pan-global problem.

There are many difficulties involved with this, not least the huge illegal trade in poultry, and for that matter, in wild animals of all kinds, animals generally kept in perfect disease-mongering conditions. The virus can leak out into the wild by means of chicken fertiliser, sloppy disposal of carcases, factory workers with birdshit on their boots. And it is really rather important that these leaks are plugged. It is here that the potential for a real horror story lies: not in the new-minted myth of death from the skies.

Because if the virus really does get out into the wild on a wide scale, it could have a catastrophic effect on biodiversity. The virus attacks an extraordinarily wide range of species of both birds and mammals: another example of the way this virus doesn’t know the rules.

Our understanding of the bird flu question is precisely upside down. It is not about the wild birds coming in to get us humans with their nasty wild diseases. The real danger is that we humans may introduce on a wide scale a virus that evolved in conditions created and nurtured by humans. Never mind the threat to business; there are larger issues at stake here. An attack on biodiversity is an attack on the basic mechanism by which the planet functions. What to do, then, to save the poor old planet? One suggestion: send your beloved a Valentine’s day gift. How about an acre of rainforest, a slab of Green and Black’s choccy, a certificate signed by the great David Attenborough and a satellite map showing exactly where your lovely pristine acres stands defiant of human folly? The World Land Trust is, as always, the place to go.

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