Chickens

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This article provides information about chickens that should prove useful to those advocating for animal rights, as well as to those exploring the rationale for veganism.

It covers various aspects of farmed chickens in the context of animal rights, including injustices and suffering, humane labels and certifications, chicken sentience and cognition, the environmental consequences of farming chickens, the health risks of chicken meat and eggs, and impacts to workers and neighborhoods.

Read it through or use the table of contents to go directly to your topic of interest.

General Information

It's commonly thought that the domesticated chickens used for meat and eggs are primarily descended from the Red Jungle Fowl of Southeast Asia. More recent research paints a more complex picture—birds from India, Cambodia, Ceylon, and other areas may also be involved in the lineage.

Chickens were used widely in Southeast Asia, India, Tibet,and were a common fixture in ancient Greece. Their exploitation in the West spread from Greece to Rome and then on to Europe.

Globally, over 76 billion chickens are slaughtered annually for meat and another 11 billion laying hens are slaughtered when their female reproductive systems are used up and they are no longer profitable. In the United States, the figures are 9 billion and 375 million. Far more chickens are slaughtered than any other farmed animal.

Injustices and Suffering

The injustices and abuses to chickens discussed below are either standard procedure or not unusual—even those chickens and chicken products with a humane label or certification, as discussed in the next section. The pressures of production require animals to be mistreated in order to be profitable. To omit a significant number of these injustices would render the products unaffordable by all but the most affluent.

Loss of Life

Chickens, like dogs, cats, wild animals, and other farmed animals, have an inherent value in and of themselves, separate from their usefulness to humans. Their lives matter to them, and they should matter to us.

As shown in the section on sentience and cognition, chickens not only have a will to live and value their lives just as humans do, but also have desires, preferences, emotions, families, social communities, natural behaviors, and sense of themselves and a sense of the future.

We have no nutritional need for chicken meat or eggs, so denying them their lives is unnecessary, as is the other forms of suffering enumerated here.

Not only are we taking their lives, we are doing so after allowing them to live only a small fraction of their natural roughly eight year lifespan. Chickens used for meat are slaughtered at 6 weeks, which is about one percent of their lifespan. Chickens used for eggs are slaughtered when their female reproductive systems are used up and they are no longer profitable—at 18 months which is 20% of their lifespan.

Slaughter

Several methods of killing chickens are used, including manual throat slitting, neck breaking, decapitation, and gassing, all of which are painful.

In the United States, where there are no federal regulations for chicken welfare, the industry claims that 99 percent of the birds are "totally unconscious" after an electrical stun, which is administered in some facilities just prior to slaughter.

But research shows that the industry uses low voltage stuns in order to avoid damage that might render the carcass unsellable. The low voltage stuns are not effective, resulting in many, if not most chickens being alive and fully conscious when their throats are slit and may remain so they enter the scalding tank.

Mass Extermination of Male Hatchlings (Culling)

Because laying hens are bred specifically to lay eggs, males hatched from the laying hen variety of chicken are not profitable—they don't yield sufficient meat and they can't lay eggs. And because they are not profitable, the males are ground alive in a macerator, gassed, or suffocated, shortly after they are hatched. This industry refers to this practice as chick culling. (Weak and struggling females are also discarded in this manner.)

Hatchlings are about 50% male and 50% female. So statistically speaking, every laying hen has a brother who has been violently slaughtered. This is true even for backyard chickens, as the female hatchlings are sold not only to commercial producers but individuals keeping backyard chickens.

In the United States, over 375 million male chicks are slaughtered via culling. Worldwide, it's in the billions.

Extra: Lack of progress on the elimination of culling

In June 2016, United Egg Producers (UEP), who claims to be responsible for 95% of egg production in the United States, issued a vague statement about supporting research to end this practice.

Following negotiations with the Humane League in 2016, Humane League executive director David Coman-Hidy stated that the UEP commitment "will virtually eliminate this practice in the American egg industry. … It is clear that chick culling will soon be a thing of the past in the United States".

This was reported by the Human League and in the press as if it were sure thing and an absolute commitment, but the UEP statement referenced above only says that "we encourage the development of an alternative with the goal of eliminating the culling of day-old male chicks by 2020 or as soon as it is commercially available and economically feasible."

As of December 2018, only one grocery store chain in Germany is selling eggs from hatcheries where males have not been slaughtered. At the time this was written, we found no reports on the elimination of culling elsewhere, including the United States.

Overcrowding and Confinement

The overwhelming

majority of chickens live in crowded factory farming conditions. In the United State number of chickens living under these conditions is likely upwards of 99%, and the figure is is tenably similar in other industrialized nations.

Extreme crowding is not only the reality for the over 95% of laying hens who are in battery cages, but also for chickens in commercial chicken houses who are not in cages.

While hens in battery cages spend their lives confined to a space less than the size of a standard sheet of paper, chickens in in commercial chicken houses don't fare much better. While they may not be confined to a cage, they are still entrapped by the mass of other chickens surrounding them.

Extra: Battery Cage Legislation

Despite failed and weak legislation at the federal and state levels, and despite the trend for producers and grocers to promise to go cage-free, as of 2014 over 95% of eggs involved battery cages. There is little evidence that the situation has materially improved since.

The egregious ramifications of this crowding are discussed below.

Deniable of Natural Behaviors

preventing or hindering their ability to turn around, preen, spread their wings, or scratch for food.

Filth and Stench

draft. Investigations reveal Filth, stench, and feces prevail. Many of the birds were covered in feces and so weak that they could not clean themselves. Have to live their entire life in suffocating stench of feathers, dander, urine, and species. Some were stuck in manure so deep it could be described as a manure pit. They were almost buried in their own feces. Some were splayed out on filthy concrete floors barely able to breathe.

Sickness and disease were common. Some were so sick you could hear them struggling to breathe. Some hens didn't have the strength to stand on their own two legs. Some barely able to move or respond to anything around them. Birds were found dead and dying. Chickens that had lost half their body weight.

Investigators were overwhelmed by the constant cries of distress.

Source

Other conditions inside the warehouses add to the misery of the confined birds. To mention only one, for brevity's sake: the ammonia-laden air in the chicken houses is so noxious that the birds commonly suffer respiratory disorders, severe flesh and eye burns, and even blindness.

Sickness and Disease

Battery Cages

Dibilitating Selective Breeding

A laying hen produces more than 300 eggs a year, but the jungle fowl from which they are bred lay less than 10 eggs in a year. This causes both physical and physiological stress. The large increase in the number of eggs laid is from a combination of selective breeding as well as the tendency of the hen to lay more when eggs are removed in order to follow her instinct to form a proper brood.

Laying hens are also bred to lay large eggs for which they have not evolved, stressing their reproductive system, and causing such problems as osteoporosis, bone breakage, and uterus prolapse.

The modern broiler chicken is unnaturally large and has been bred to grow at an unnaturally fast rate and have large-sized breasts. This selective breeding comes with serious welfare consequences, including leg disorders, skeletal, developmental and degenerative diseases, heart and lung problems, breathing difficulty, and premature death.

Debeaking

Debeaking is painful, causes lasting suffering, impairs feeding, eliminates exploratory pecking, and contributes to lice from impaired preening.

Rough Handling

When chickens raised for meat reach their desired slaughter weight, they are caught, created, transported, unloaded, and placed in holding pens until slaughter.

A review of videos of these activities shows squawking birds bring grabbed 4 at a time by their feet being roughly thrown or shoved into crowded crates, birds suffering dislocations and broken bones, wings and heads crushed in crates, feed withdrawal, birds dying from suffocation, heat and cold, and birds unable to stand from exhaustion.

Research bears this out—a 2016 study in Poultry Science revealed that in addition to the physiological stress these procedures inflict, it is not unusual for a bird to experience dehydration, disease, injury, and pain, and even death. The injuries include wing and leg fractures, lesions, bleeding, bruising.

Light Manipulation

Osteoporosis

Forced Molting

Mental Illness

Humane Labels and Certifications

Investigations by Consumer Reports, The Open Philanthropy Project, and numerous others reveal that these certifications and labels are largely meaningless, as shown below.

These investigations show that the standards are weak and unenforced, audits and inspections are rarely done, and if they are done and violations are found, which is infrequent, no one gets fined.

Extra: Suggested script for discussing humane labels and certifications

When discussing humane labels and certifications, in addition to providing some of the details presented in this section, conveying the ideas presented in the following script might be useful:

Many believe that we are not harming animals when we use them for food as long as we treat them well while they are living. The justification given for this view is that animals don't have a sense of the future, and thus don’t have an interest in continuing to live. However, current research in cognitive ethology and neurobiology, as shown above, says otherwise.

But if one holds this belief in spite of the science, and wants to live by their own values, they might, with good intentions, decide to buy only animal products that have some sort of humane label or certification. However, investigations by Consumer Research, The Open Philanthropy Project, and numerous others reveal that these certifications and labels are largely meaningless.

These investigations show that the standards are weak and unenforced, audits and inspections are rarely done, and if they are done and violations are found, which is infrequent, no one gets fined.

So even if you buy into the idea that it’s OK to eat animal products as long as the animals are treated well, there is virtually no chance that the animals have, in fact, been treated well, regardless of what label is on the package. While certain labels may represent less suffering for some of the abuses, other abuses remain. The mitigation of some of the cruelties does not justify the remaining ones.

Humane labels and certifications are, for the most part, marketing ploys. They are designed to assuage our guilt, and they can engender higher profits because the industry knows that concerned, kindhearted consumers are willing to pay more for products they perceive to be humanely produced.

The life of any farmed animal can only be described as one of commodified, abusive servitude ending in brutal slaughter. When viewed objectively, free from the fog of our cultural norms, their treatment and slaughter, by any standard of fairness and justice—cannot be considered humane.

Cage-Free

Consumer Reports advises you to “ignore cage-free claims” for chickens. "'Cage-free' does not mean the chickens had access to the outdoors." It only means the chickens were not confined to a cage.

Cage-free chickens, like free-range chickens, may be confined not by a cage but by crowding so extreme that turning around and engaging in the natural behaviors of preening, nesting, foraging, dust bathing, and perching is difficult or impossible. Such extreme crowding in large metal warehouses is the norm.

Free Range

The USDA standard for free-range requires only that chickens are given some access to the outdoors. There are no stipulations for the size or quality of the outdoor space, and there is no requirement that the chickens actually spend time outdoors. Also, the claim does not have to be verified through inspections.

So it's not surprising that investigations by Consumer Reports (and others) reveal that most chickens labeled free-range spend their lives confined inside a crowded chicken house. The free-range space itself may be nothing more than an enclosed concrete slab that the chickens never use. These individuals lack the room even to turn around, much less engage in their natural behaviors of preening, nesting, foraging, dust bathing, and perching. This has led Consumer Reports to say that free range is one of the most potentially misleading labels because of the discrepancy between what it implies and what is required to make the claim."

Only one percent of eggs are from free-range hens that have the option to go outdoors, but like the other 99 percent, even those hens have likely never actually been outdoors.

Jonathan Foer, in his well-researched and fact-checked book Eating Animals, sums it up well in saying that "the free-range label is bullshit" and "should provide no more peace of mind than 'all-natural,' 'fresh,' or 'magical.'"

Whole Foods Market (GAP)

Whole Foods Market spearheaded the development of the Global Animal Partnership (GAP) certification program and sells various products, including eggs and chicken meat, with GAP labels.

The Open Philanthropy Project criticized GAP for having weak enforcement and for providing only slight improvements over standard factory farming conditions. For example, according to Consumer Reports, "standards for slaughter do not exist at any level for chickens and there is no limit on their rate of growth."

Organic

Some have the perception that chickens with the organic label means they are humanely raised, but that is not the case. Organic farmers are free to treat their animals no better than non-organic farmers. This is because the USDA, which controls the organic label in the United States, ruled that the label does not allow "broadly prescriptive, stand-alone animal welfare regulations."

Consumer Reports informs us that while there are organic standards relating to animals, they lack clarity and precision, letting producers with poor standards sell poultry and eggs.

United Egg Producers Certified

Consumer Reports says that while the label is verified, "it is not meaningful as an animal welfare label because certain basic conditions, such as the freedom to move, are not required."

Details: Freedom to Move

According to Consumer Reports, "the UEP Certified guidelines allow continuous confinement in crowded cages in dimly lit buildings without natural light and fresh air. Hens only have to be given enough space to stand upright, with a minimum space requirement of 8 by 8 inches for white laying hens kept in a cage. Producers keeping their hens in cages do not have to allow the hens to move freely, perch, dust bathe, or forage, and nest boxes are not required. While the label is verified, it is not meaningful as an animal welfare label because certain basic conditions, such as the freedom to move, are not required."

American Humane Certified

According to Consumer Reports, "the requirements fall short in meeting consumer expectations for a 'humane' label in many ways."

Animal Welfare Approved

This is the only certification that Consumer Reports says has strong standards, yet the standards still allow for mutilationsand other injustices. Also, products with this label are challenging to find. A search using their own product finder reveals that it's unlikely you will find any products with this label at a grocery store near you.

Certified humane raised and handled

Consumer Reports says that "we do not rate Certified Humane as a highly meaningful label for animal welfare, because the standards do not have certain requirements that a majority of consumers expect from a 'humanely raised' label, such as access to the outdoors."

Backyard chickens

Although backyard chickens are not associated with a certification or label like the others that we are covering here, they deserve a closer look. A considerable number of people regard the practice of keeping chickens in the backyard for food as innocuous.

Baby chicks often die in transport. A quick search will find numerous reports of chicks being shipped alive to backyard hobbyists and dying in transport—and reports of those that make it being greatly stressed.

Backyard chickens are the same varieties or similar varies as commercial chickens, and are subject to all of the abuses that result from culling and selective breeding, as discussed below.

Backyard hens are likely to be slaughtered when egg production wanes, preventing them from living out their natural lives. As one hobbyist euphemistically put it, "when the expenses outweigh the value, then changes have to be made."

The slaughter of backyard chickens whether laying hens or broiler chickens, is usually done by slitting the throat and waiting for the convulsing chicken die its slow death. The slaughter is violent, cruel, and painful, just as with commercial operations.

Human Health and Nutrition

Eggs

Chicken Meat

Social Consequences of Chicken Production

Worker Injuries

Poultry workers suffer serious injuries at twice the rate of other industries, and are more than six times as likely to have sickness related to work, according to The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

OSHA data from 2013 revealed poultry worker suffered carpal tunnel syndrome seven times more than average and workers were 4.5 times more likely to identify repetitive motion for serious injury.

The GAO found that workers were hesitant to speak up about the injuries for fear of retaliation, suggesting the problems may be underreported.

The Union of Concerned Scientists concludes that with the increase in chicken processing line speeds allowed by the USDA in late 2018, the situation will only get worse.

Worker Mental Health

Neighborhood Crime

Concluding Remarks

To those who have fully absorbed the undeniable scope and breadth of the suffering propagated by chicken production and consumption to both chickens and humans, the word juggling and mental gymnastics made in attempts to maintain the mental fog of denial seems incredible and is regrettable. Truth and logic are on the side of justice for chickens and for all exploited animals.

Meta

This page was originally authored by Greg Fuller. The contents may have been edited since that time by others.

Notes to be deleted after integrating and before publication Undercover investigations at human certified farms show that the standards are not enforced and abuses still occur. One such investigation at Pitman Family Farms revealed that even the lowest level stipulation of "no cages no crowding", which is supposed to be adhered to for all animal foods sold at Whole Foods, is not even close to being enforced.

According to one investigator of a Whole Foods certified chicken house they "replaced cages of wire with cages of flesh."

The video shows:

Congestion so bad that in some areas the hens were piled on top of each other. In other cases, birds received no more than a square foot of space. Chickens that had lost all or most of their feathers from the crowded filthy conditions. You could see the rashes, inflammation. Chickens bumping into each other and squawking in agitation.

Mutilations including de-toeing, clipping, beak trimming and other surgical procedures performed without anesthetic.

• A group of veterinarians and other experts appointed by Parliament to look into farming practices concluded, "There is no physiological basis for the assertion that the operation is similar to the clipping of human fingernails. Between the horn and bone [of the beak] is a thin layer of highly sensitive soft tissue, resembling the quick of the human nail. The hot knife blade used in debeaking cuts through this complex horn, bone and sensitive tissue causing severe pain."

Only at Step 5 are chickens allowed to perch.

• USDA Definition of Free Range for Chickens
  • Free range chickens are only required to have access to the outside, without reference to size or conditions of the space..
• What free range means in practice
  • A tiny door leading to a small concrete slab beside a chicken house holding hundreds of chickens.
  • The term free-range does not carry any other conditions such as the number of chickens, space per chicken, or environmental quality.

Cage-free is also meaningless.

• It just means they are not in a cage. It doesn't mean they are not crowded to the extent that they cannot engage in natural behaviors, such as

Audits are infrequent, done by outside contractors, and announced (not suprise), and do not result in decertifications.

• Research reveals no loss of certifications.
• GAP audits are required every 15 months.
• PETA sued Whole Foods Market on the grounds that the program deceived customers into paying higher prices for certified products.
  • According to the complaint, "the entire audit process for Whole Foods' animal welfare standards is a sham because it occurs infrequently and violations of the standards do not cause loss of certification...Standards that are not actually enforced create a false impression of ensuring a more humanely treated, higher quality animal product — when in fact they ensure no such thing."
  • The case was dismissed on a technicality, not because the deceptions were proven false, but because the complaint did not raise a consumer safety issue.
• The Open Philanthropy Project confirmed these suspicions.
  • For most animals on the program, GAP offers only offers small improvements over standard factory farming.
  • Standards are not properly audited and enforced.
  • Source
    • "In our view, the most credible criticism of GAP is that its standards are not as strict or rigorously enforced as they might be. In particular, a large portion of the 290 million animals covered by GAP standards are chickens and turkeys kept in Step 2 facilities, which represent only a slight improvement on standard factory farming conditions. We also think there have been issues with GAP’s contract auditors failing to properly enforce GAP’s standards. However, we believe these concerns are outweighed by the value of bringing new large producers into a regulatory scheme for the first time, under which they can be audited, regulated, and pushed toward higher standards. We are heartened to see that GAP is strengthening its broiler chicken standards,13 and we hope that this grant will allow it to improve its standards and enforcement of those standards further."

Under the requirement that farms be profitable, animals are still treated as units of production, not as living, breathing, sentient beings.

Humane labels are designed to make us feel better about what we are eating and to pay more. They seem to be more about marketing than about compassion.

Some of the harms are systemic to the system.

• Some of the cruelties are systemic to the production processes such that removing one or more of the cruelties would raise the price of the product, often to such an extent the product would no longer be affordable except to the richest among us.
• No matter which kind of harm we are talking about, conscious beings, beings that have a life they value, are hung up to bleed, passed around on conveyor belts, dragged through electrified water, sliced up into different products, and packaged in cellophane because we like to eat them.
• In the end, they are all slaughtered and lose a life they value.