Millions of Mistreated Chickens—The Truth About Meat Chickens

“You don’t have to be a vegan to wonder if it is right to put another entire species in perpetual pain in order to satisfy a craving for chicken salad and deviled eggs.” – Andrew Lawler, “Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?”

Broiler Chickens (Wikimedia Commons - Naim Alel -  Птичник.JPG)

There have been a few readers who have taken umbrage to my posts about the mistreatment of chickens.  And I get where they’re coming from.  It can be distressing to navigate to my blog looking for pictures of cute Hipster Hens happily pecking and playing in my coop, and instead get hit over the head with stories about millions of chickens being mistreated.

But here’s the deal—if you scroll down to the bottom of this page you’ll find Randy’s Chicken Blog's mission statement.  There you’ll find these declarative sentences: “My chickens are really cool.  All chickens are really cool. The majority of chickens being raised for meat or egg production, in spite of their inherent coolness, are treated cruelly. You can help make changes by your purchasing habits. Educate yourself! Read labels! Check company websites!”  I think it would be unethical to blog about chickens without also discussing the issues surrounding the treatment of commercial chickens. While it’s great that we love our backyard hens, we can’t lose sight of the fact that the majority of the chickens alive in the world right now have miserable lives.  It is important that we chicken appreciators stay informed about the situation because we do appreciate chickens and we recognize them to be intelligent, sentient creatures who have the capacity for joy, but also the capacity to suffer.

My earlier posts on this subject have been about egg-laying hens. I’ve written a series of posts about California’s Prop 2 and how that has affected egg producing hens.  I’ve also addressed the welfare of laying hens in my series on egg cartons.  In this post, I’ll delve into the welfare of chickens being raised for meat.

For almost the entire history of domestic chickens, meat chickens and egg-laying chickens were one and the same—young roosters were used for meat and the young hens laid eggs for a couple of years and then became stew.    That all changed about a hundred years ago when chicken producers started cross-breeding experiments to improve feed efficiency and growth.  By the 1960’s a hybrid chicken produced by crossing Cornish chickens with Plymouth Rocks had become the dominant meat chicken and was so superior to other breeds in meat production that the roosters of other chicken breeds were no longer competitive, and the industry moved to a process of determining the sex of baby chicks as soon as they hatched and then euthanizing the males, most typically by feeding them into a high-speed grinder.

Developing chickens that gain weight quickly and produce lots of desirable breast meat has continued apace.  Today’s breeder hatcheries produce billions of meat chickens every year and today’s meat chickens are grotesque. They eat voraciously and can reach a “slaughter weight” of five pounds in a little over a month – their bodies become big while they’re still chicks behaviorally.  Their ungainly meaty breast muscles become so large that their center of gravity shifts, stressing their skeletal structure and causing constant pain.

These hybrid meat chickens are never referred to as a particular breed by the industry.  Instead the newly developed types are often designated with numbers.  For example, Aviagen, a large breeder hatchery, advertises the Ross 308 and the Ross 708 and proclaims that “The Ross product range provides customers all over the world with performance that best suits their needs. “   It would be easy, from this and other statements on the Aviagen website, to lose track of the fact that the “product” being discussed, a 308 or a 708, is a sentient creature.  The Hubbard Company announces that “When permitted the Hubbard F15 Female can be housed at a density 20 to 25% higher per m² than a standard breeder.”  Translation:  If the local laws allow this degree of animal cruelty, you can pack F15 hens at an even higher density than the approximately .8 square feet per chicken industry standard.

Let’s take a look at a day in the short life of a typical broiler chicken.  We could identify this chicken with a number, but I’m going to give him a name.  I’ll call him Ross.  Ross never goes outdoors.  He lives in a barn with thousands of other chickens.  Chickens are social animals and are able to recognize a certain number of other chickens – but not thousands.   So, Ross spends his life lost in a crowd.  Ross gets, as I mentioned before, around .8 square feet of living space.  If you imagine a box about 10¾ inches on a side, that’s how much space Ross gets.  (In some situations, chickens get less space than this—there’s a formula based on the weight of the chicken.  According to one industry newsletter, if chickens were given more space, even one square foot per chicken, “Houses would not cash flow [and] growers would not achieve a satisfactory return.” Translation:  If chickens would be given a humane amount of space, producers would make less money.) But Ross is not in a box—the “sides” of his box are made of other chickens who bump him and jostle him and perhaps peck him when he bumps and jostles them.  Ross jostles and bumps a lot because of his lameness and his awkward stride.  Bumping and jostling through the crowd stresses Ross and his heart, which is too tiny for his ungainly body, often palpitates wildly.  Because of this, Ross often just sits in one spot and sleeps in the chicken poop that covers the floor.  He has sores on his body from spending so much time in the caustic manure.

Ross doesn’t see very well because of the dim light in the barn.  His eyes also burn from the ammonia in the air produced by all that chicken manure covering the floor. But he does dimly make out the form of the person that grabs him and shoves him into a crate with lots of other chickens.  Ross’s crate is packed on a truck, the truck rumbles down the road, then his crate is taken off the truck and another person pulls Ross out of the crate and hangs him by his feet from a hook on an assembly line.  The hook moves Ross through an electrified tank of water to stun him.  Then Ross is slaughtered.

I wonder what Ross thought about life.  Chickens can experience happiness.  Was he ever happy?  Should we care about such things, or should we just dismiss his pain as our gain when we dig into that bag of chicken nuggets?

I know.  This is really bleak.  But Ross’s life represents the lives of billions of chickens who are experiencing exactly what I described right now as you read this.  I repeat for emphasis:  Ross is not an aberration.  This is how most broiler chickens are treated. The good news is that in 2017 we made some progress in finding our way out of this horror story.  Things are not changing because of any major changes in our federal laws.  The factory farm lobby is very strong and most attempts at legislative change have fizzled.  Changes have occurred because millions of consumers, like you, have voted with their pocketbooks. 

Many food companies have responded to the demands of their customers and are now requiring their chicken suppliers to make their animal husbandry practices more humane.  In 2017, three of the largest companies to make the change were Campbell Soup, Nestlé, and Kraft Heinz.  These companies have pledged to switch to healthier strains of chickens instead of the quick-growing monster chickens.  They have also agreed to give chickens a less crowded and more enriched living space, and to change to more humane practices in the slaughtering process.

Because many consumers want to know that the chicken they’re eating was humanely treated, and since the government labeling program for humanely raised meat is essentially nonexistent, a number of certifying organizations have sprung up to fill that void.  There is, of course, a gradient in the stringency of the certifications and differences in what they cover.  All certifying agencies look at the environment the chicken was raised in: Was the chicken given adequate space? Was the light bright enough? Was night-time darkness provided? Was he allowed outdoors?  Was “enrichment” provided so he could engage in natural chicken activities? Chickens confined indoors in crowded conditions with nothing to do act out by becoming aggressive and even cannibalistic. If you were deprived of any mental stimulation or opportunities for activity and were forced to stand around in a crowd 24/7, how would you act?  Bingo!  Chickens are like that, too!  “Enrichment” is the process of making the environment more complex, and encouraging natural behavior.  It can be as simple as tossing some bales of straw or hay into the barn for the chickens to peck and scratch at, providing roosts and raised platforms, hanging ropes to peck at, and providing some sort of forage or scratch grain.  Chickens who are lucky enough to be allowed to spend their day foraging outdoors don’t need that indoor enrichment.  Some agencies go beyond tracking these steps.  Some delve into the physical makeup of the bird and disallow the genetic freaks who live their lives in pain.  Finally, some look at the part of the “farm-to-table” pathway that nobody likes to think about—the slaughtering process.  But to turn a living animal into meat, slaughter has to happen and some agencies have standards to ensure that it is done humanely.  And some also examine how chickens are transported from where they were raised to the slaughterhouse. 

I’ll end this post with a chart I put together that shows the certifying labels you should look for when you buy chicken.  I’ve ranked them from least to most stringent.  Please note that the Global Animal Partnership has six different "steps".  Their motive is to get companies to certify with them at a low level of stringency and then move to higher levels as they institute more humane practices.  This is a thumbnail.  For a more thorough discussion of these certifications, take a look at this Farm Forward post.

Least Stringent
American Humane Certified	Indoor Space:  10.1 x 10.1 inches for a 5 lb. chicken Air ammonia levels:  25 ppm Light: At least 4 hours of darkness each day Indoor Environmental Enrichment:  Encouraged but not required Outdoor Access:  Not required Genetics (limits on growth rate, etc.):  “No more than 10% of the flock may show difficulty walking”  Growth rate not addressed Slaughter:  An Animal Welfare Officer checks to make sure chickens are stunned and insensible to pain prior to entering the scalding tank and throughout the slaughter operation.
Global Animal Partnership – Step 1	Indoor space:    10.1 x 10.1 inches for a 5 lb. chicken Air ammonia levels:  20 ppm Light:  6 hours of darkness Indoor Environmental Enrichment:  Not required Outdoor Access:  Not required Genetics:  Genetic lines must be selected for good leg health and for low levels of mortality.  There is no limit on the rate of growth. Slaughter:  No standards.
Global Animal Partnership – Step 2	Indoor space:     10.5 by 10.5 inches for a 5-pound bird Air ammonia levels:  20 ppm Light:  6 hours of darkness Indoor Environmental Enrichment:  At least one type of enrichment must be provided Outdoor Access:  Not required Genetics:   Genetic lines must be selected for good leg health and for low levels of mortality.  There is no limit on the rate of growth. Slaughter:  No standards
Global Animal Partnership – Step 3	Indoor space:    10.9 by 10.9 inches for a 5-pound bird Air ammonia levels:  20 ppm Light:  At least 8 hours of darkness each day.  Indoor Environmental Enrichment:  At least two types of enrichment must be provided Outdoor Access:  Required access to an outdoor area that is equal to or greater than 25 percent of the total indoor floor space.  At least 25 percent of the outdoor area must be covered in vegetation and/or forage. Genetics:  Genetic lines must be selected for good leg health and for low levels of mortality.  There is no limit on the rate of growth. Slaughter:  No standards
Certified Humane	Indoor space:  11 x 11 inches for a 5 lb. chicken Air ammonia levels: “Less than 10 ppm at bird height and must not exceed 25 ppm except during brief periods of severe inclement weather” Light:  At least 6 hours of darkness each day Indoor Environmental Enrichment:  Required Outdoor Access: Not required Genetics (limits on growth rate, etc.): “Care must be taken to select birds for high welfare traits and avoid genetic strains with undesirable traits.”  No specific limits on growth rate Slaughter:   An Animal Welfare Officer checks to make sure chickens are stunned and insensible to pain prior to entering the scalding tank and throughout the slaughter operation.
Global Animal Partnership – Step 4	Indoor space:    11.4 by 11.4 inches for a 5-pound bird Air ammonia levels:  20 ppm Light:  At least 8 hours of darkness per day Indoor Environmental Enrichment:  At least two types of enrichment must be provided Outdoor Access:  Outdoor access is required during daylight hours when weather is not inclement.  “Outdoors” is defined as pastures, rangelands, lots, cover crop areas, woodlands, and harvested crop areas.  At least 50 percent of the outdoor area must be covered in vegetation and/or forage.  When weather is inclement, chickens must have access to an outdoor area that is equal to or greater than 25 percent of the total indoor floor space. Genetics:  Genetic lines must be selected for good leg health and for low levels of mortality.  There is no limit on the rate of growth. Slaughter:  No standards
Global Animal Partnership – Steps  5 & 5+	Indoor space:   1 square foot per 5-pound bird Air ammonia levels:  20 ppm Light:  At least 8 hours of darkness per day Indoor Environmental Enrichment:  Not required – chickens live outside Outdoor Access:  Outdoor access is required during daylight hours when weather is not inclement.  “Outdoors” is defined as pastures, rangelands, lots, cover crop areas, woodlands, and harvested crop areas.  At least 75 percent of the outdoor area must be covered in vegetation and/or forage.  Genetics:  Genetic lines must be selected for good leg health and for low levels of mortality.  There is no limit on the rate of growth. Slaughter:  No standards
Animal Welfare Approved	Indoor space:  9.8 x 9.8 inches Air ammonia levels: “The human nose can detect ammonia at levels of 5ppm upwards. If the farmer can smell ammonia action must be taken to eliminate the source.” Light:  At least 8 hours of darkness each day.  Natural light must enter the barn and light must average at least 20 lux during daylight hours Indoor Environmental Enrichment:  Not required – chickens live outside Outdoor Access:  All chickens should “have access to the outdoor ranging and foraging area from as early on in life as possible. This could be from two to three days old onwards if conditions allow.”  When poultry are excluded from outdoor ranging and foraging areas due to extreme weather, in addition to their indoor space, they must have 17 x 17 inches of non-forage outdoor space. Genetics:  Cloned or genetically engineered birds are prohibited and growth must not exceed 0.088 lbs (40 g) per day. Slaughter:  On farm slaughter is recommended (to avoid transport) and Controlled Atmosphere Killing (a method generally accepted as being humane) is recommended.
Most Stringent