How humans invented the modern meat chicken (A Breed Apart - Part 1)
Chicken is cheap. That’s what makes it the most popular meat protein around the world.
But why is it so cheap?
The breeds of chicken raised for meat are super-efficient at turning food they eat into muscle – because the industry made them that way. Meat chickens, often referred to as “broilers” are completely different breeds to the chickens raised for egg laying. These separate breeds were first invented in the 1950s. Before then, chickens were farmed as dual purpose to produce both eggs and meat.
From the 1950s, the chicken industry began focusing on selectively breeding chickens who grew bigger and faster. Those chickens were only kept for a few months before they were slaughtered for meat, so not much attention was paid to the side effects of genetic selection for fast growth. Many people prefer chicken breast meat, so there was also selection for chickens that grew very large breast muscles.
This genetic selection over many chicken generations, combined with modifying their food for maximum growth and engineering their living conditions to raise as many chickens as possible as cheaply as possible, has come at a huge cost to animal welfare.
How fast is “fast-growing”?
Image source: University of Alberta
Between 1950 and 2005, meat chicken growth rate increased by over 400%.
In the 1950s, commercially raised meat chickens took 70 days to reach about 1.4kg, which is when they were slaughtered.
By the 1990s, it took only 52 days for a chicken to grow to a new slaughter weight of 2.3kg.
Today, chickens can reach that same weight in just 35 days, the age when many chickens are now slaughtered.
In less than a century, the chicken industry has created chickens that grow nearly twice as large, in nearly half the time.
This faster growth is almost entirely due to genetic selection.
The chicken industry has been continually breeding for faster and faster growth, to the point where a fast-growing chicken from the 90s is now considered a moderate-growing chicken.
There has also been genetic selection for bigger breast muscles (as that’s now the most popular cut of meat). Today’s fast-growing chickens’ breast muscles make up a quarter (25%) of their total body weight. This is why they’re so unbalanced, and so heavy. In other breeds that have not been subjected to such intense selective breeding, the breast muscles only make up about 15% of their body weight.
What’s wrong with modern meat chickens?
The problem for fast-growing chickens is that they grow too fast for their bodies to handle.
They gain enormous amounts of weight for their size, before their bones are strong enough to support that weight.
They grow so fast that in their first week of life, they may be more than four times bigger than when they hatched.
Image source: Farm Transparency Project
Growing abnormally fast makes meat chickens prone to a range of serious health problems, including:
Leg deformities
Metabolic disorders (such as heart and breathing problems)
Skin lesions
Losing the ability to perform core chicken behaviours, like perching or moving around to forage
Muscle weakness and diseases, especially in the breast muscles
What this means is that, during their short lives, most fast-growing chickens will experience chronic pain, find it difficult to move around easily as they grow, and ultimately, they may die before they reach 5 weeks old (which is when they typically go to slaughter).
Fast-growing meat chickens are so deeply genetically compromised that they would still suffer from these problems, even if you were to take one home and raise them in your backyard with everything they need to be happy and healthy.
How does growing too fast affect a chicken’s emotional wellbeing?
This is a difficult question to answer. We can’t ask chickens exactly how they feel, or what their mood is like directly, so we have to find indicators of their emotional state instead.
Science tells us that chickens can experience a wide and complex range of emotions, including pain, frustration, boredom, and even empathy with other chickens. We can see from commonly observed differences in behaviour that fast-growing chicken breeds are suffering far more than slower growing, healthier breeds.
Fast-growing meat chickens are typically less active than slow-growing chickens, meaning they spend less time walking around, foraging, pecking, dust-bathing, and preening.
Activity level is related to health. So, it is likely that at least some of the reason for their reduced activity is that fast-growing chickens find moving around uncomfortable or painful, or they simply don’t feel well enough to want to engage with their environment or perform comfort behaviours like preening and dust-bathing.
Image source: RSPCA UK
The future of meat chicken genetics
We can’t let the chicken industry keep going down this path. They need to change course. Even a modest reduction in the speed of chickens’ growth would make a massive difference for their welfare.
That change is already happening in other parts of the world. Campaigns for the Better Chicken Commitment are successfully bringing modern slower growing breeds into the mainstream chicken industry.
We don’t need to turn back the clock to the 1950s to improve chicken welfare. The world’s leading poultry genetics companies have created modern breeds which meet the Better Chicken Commitment’s higher welfare standards. We just need to bring them to the Australian market.
Help make life better for chickens
Two easy actions you can do right now to help chickens are:
Sign the Better Chicken Commitment pledge, to show that you support businesses making the switch to better chicken.
Spread the word – most Aussies are unaware of how bad life is for our chickens, and, like you, will want better welfare standards.
Add your name here to show the chicken industry and food businesses that you want higher welfare chicken products that meet the requirements of the Better Chicken Commitment.
As our campaign grows, there’ll be more opportunities to help demonstrate your support for the Better Chicken Commitment. Signing our BCC pledge will also get you on our email list, where we’ll share more opportunities to help chickens have a better life.
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Like most Australians, I care about the welfare of farmed animals.
Chickens farmed for meat are one of the most poorly treated animals in the agriculture industry. Every year, millions of Aussie chickens suffer short, miserable lives before being slaughtered using outdated and cruel methods. I want that to change.
As many Australians like me grow more aware and concerned about how animals are farmed for food, I'm looking to restaurants and shops to match expectations for better animal welfare, sustainability, and food quality.
I’m calling on food businesses to sign the Better Chicken Commitment and introduce higher welfare standards for all chickens in their supply chain. This includes better living conditions, more humane slaughter methods, and switching to healthier, slower growing chicken breeds that promote good welfare.
It’s time to change the way chickens are farmed in Australia.
The Better Chicken Commitment must be the new standard for Aussie chickens.