Factory Farming

The Chicken Industry

Every year animal welfare organisations step in to rescue thousands of chickens that at less than two years of age are deemed to be no longer economically viable for egg production. This is the tip of the ice berg and barely even scraped. Worse, many farmers will charge the rescuers for the privilege of rescuing the birds.

Complex creatures, chickens are thinking, feeling animals capable of forming friendships within an equally complex pecking order. They care for their young, enjoy nest building, roosting in trees and dust bathing.

And yet most of the chickens reared for meat spend their six week life inside foul-smelling windowless sheds never to see the light of day. This short existence is spent cramped amongst 30 - 40,000 other chickens, each within a space roughly the size of an A4 sheet of paper. There is no sunlight or fresh air, no opportunity to display natural behaviour. Over 850 million chickens suffer this fate every year in the UK.

Today's chickens are little more than chicks in an obese adult body, selectively bred then slaughtered at just 41 days old with their eyes still blue, most of them crippled, their unnatural body weight too much for their still young bones. Millions will die from heart and lung problems that this rapid growth brings about, others unable to reach food and water will die from dehydration and starvation, hock burns from the ammonia-rich faeces covering the shed floor marking their sensitive skin.

Infected poultry is one of the main sources for both Campylobacter and Salmonella food poisoning and considering the squalor inside the sheds the spread of germs remains unsurprising. To combat these diseases, antibiotics are routinely added to chicken feed. Cramped conditions combined with accelerated growth have also resulted in birds that contain more fat than protein, a single chicken often containing a pint of fat.

Also slaughtered and processed into ‘convenience foods' are exhausted battery hens. Around 30 million male chicks, the wrong sex to lay eggs and too skinny for meat, are killed annually in the UK. And how? ...They are thrown alive into electric mincers or gassed.

For further information read Viva's broiler chicken fact sheet or to learn more about egg farming see Viva's egg fact sheet.