What’s wrong with chicken farming?
Most Australians care about farmed animals and are shocked to find out how poor the current welfare standards for chickens are.
Unlike in some other parts of the world, the welfare of chickens raised for meat in Australia hasn’t changed much in the last decade.
We’re here to explain what’s wrong with chicken farming, and what you can do to help.
It’s important for consumers to have full transparency over where chicken meat comes from, and what the lives of chickens are like. The industry doesn't want you to have this knowledge, because most people have higher expectations for chicken welfare than the reality of modern chicken production.
We can do better – check out our guide to the Better Chicken Commitment to see the higher standard we could have here in Australia. Then sign the Better Chicken Commitment pledge to help us show food businesses and the chicken industry that Australians want higher welfare chicken.
Image: Farm Transparency Project
Breed
The chickens we buy to eat from the supermarket are a very different breed to those that lay the eggs we buy or the hens we keep in our backyards. This is because meat chickens have been genetically selected over several decades to grow as big and as quickly as possible.
Today, most commercial chickens raised for meat are fast-growing birds, which are fully grown in just five weeks. Chicken producers want to increase their profits by growing as much chicken meat as they can in as little time as possible. But this comes at a huge cost to the welfare of chickens.
The genetic selection of chickens has prioritised rapid growth alone, so there has been little attention paid to whether these chickens are suffering. We now have an enormous industry built on producing very large chickens very quickly while their bodies struggle to cope with this abnormal growth.
Sadly, this means the chickens bred and raised for meat by commercial producers are prone to many serious health issues.
But there is an alternative. Healthier breeds of chickens that suffer less from these problems do exist. These chickens grow at a slower rate. The Better Chicken Commitment calls for chicken producers to switch to one of these slower growing, higher welfare breeds.
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As a direct result of their fast growth, meat chickens are prone to leg deformities and lameness as their body weight increases faster than their bodies can handle. These problems can be so severe that sometimes chickens can’t even stand or walk around normally. Severely lame birds may experience chronic pain and are unable to perch or get to food or water. These problems are caused by genetic selection, which means it’s not just a matter of feeding chickens less or giving them more room so they can exercise. Their muscles will grow unnaturally fast and their bones not fast enough, no matter how they are treated.
Larger breast muscles make these fast-growing chickens unbalanced, with more weight forward in their bodies. This can make chickens reluctant to walk, or cause microfractures in the main leg bones, which can lead to bacterial infections. Problems with lameness are much less common in slower growing chickens.
Meat chickens are also prone to skin inflammation on their foot pads and burns on their hocks (the joint on a bird's leg which looks like a backwards knee). Research has found that fast-growing chickens are much more likely to experience these painful conditions than slower growing chickens at the same stocking density. This is likely due to their increased skin contact with damp litter, due to being unable to walk normally.
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Fast-growing chickens have a high basal metabolic rate. In other words, their hearts are working really hard just to keep them alive. In some cases, this results in part of the heart becoming abnormally large as it tries to cope with the extra work and prevent pressure and fluid building up in the chicken’s abdominal cavity. This condition is called ascites and is likely to be painful for chickens - it can also result in fatal heart attacks.
Across the world, ascites has been reported in 5 percent of chickens, but it may be as high as 20 percent in some places. (That equates to a potential 140 million Australian chickens per year at risk of pain and death from ascites). Abnormal heart rhythms (cardiac arrhythmia) have also been reported in 27 percent of fast-growing chickens, but only at 1 percent in all other flocks. This tells us that heart problems are a specific problem for fast-growing chickens.
Aside from the heart, fast-growing chickens have smaller organs than slower growing chickens, despite having larger bodies. We don’t yet know all the ways this could affect the health and daily wellbeing of chickens. One study raised concerns that fast-growing chickens may have difficulty breathing and be more susceptible to heat stress as they can’t pant normally to cool down. Breathlessness is a serious animal welfare issue.
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Burns and blisters on the skin covering the chicken’s breast are also more common in fast-growing chickens than slower growing breeds. As with footpad inflammation and hock burns, the likely cause of this is because these birds are less able to move, so are spending more time sitting in contact with damp litter.
Fast-growing birds also show a range of muscular abnormalities, particularly in the breast. We don’t know what these abnormalities feel like for the birds that have them, but it may be a chronic source of pain. It may also affect how their body works and how they move. This may also lead to chickens resting in places that are too wet, too hot or too cold, or have poor ventilation, to avoid the pain of walking around.
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Fast-growing meat chickens may be more prone to gut problems such as diarrhea. Recent research has found that chickens who don’t grow so fast have more diverse and healthy gut flora than fast-growing meat chickens. This can affect human health, because bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter are harmful to humans.
Image: Farm Transparency Project
Living Conditions
Intensive chicken producers are focused on maximising profit for their shareholders, which means keeping feed, housing and care costs as low as possible. Housing thousands of animals at high densities on a large scale is a common means of reducing these production costs, but it comes at a huge cost to bird welfare.
In each chicken shed, tens of thousands of chickens are packed together. They have very little space to move, poor lighting, and a sparse environment that doesn’t allow for natural chicken behaviours. Living conditions make a huge impact on the quality of life for chickens – and some very simple changes can help reduce their suffering.
All animals that are being raised to feed people deserve a life worth living. A life full of daily frustration and deprived of the joy of exploration and discovery is not a good life. The Better Chicken Commitment requires better living conditions for chickens, including objects to perch on and peck or scratch at, good air and litter quality, and enough space to move around freely.
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Space in chicken sheds is measured in kg/m² to take account of the size of each bird which, with growing chickens, increases every day of their short lives. The lower the number of kg/m², the more space is available for each chicken to sit, move around, flap their wings, dustbathe and forage.
Most standards allow a stocking density so high that each fully grown chicken gets roughly an A4 piece of paper of space. As the chickens rapidly grow, they run out of room to stretch out without touching another chicken. This means that chickens struggle to move around as much as they should to keep themselves healthy. Chickens who move less are more likely to develop infections, skin burns, and lameness.
It’s important for chickens to have enough space to act like chickens, to keep their bodies healthy and prevent painful injuries.
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Chickens, like us, need some natural sunlight to keep physically and mentally healthy. It’s also important for chickens to have enough light to encourage them to be active and move around – preventing health issues.
Light level is measured in lux. Outside on an overcast day you’ll experience around 1,000 lux. A low light you might use in a dining room may provide around 50-100 lux. Most chicken sheds in Australia have no windows, so indoor birds will never experience natural light. Artificial lighting levels are usually kept low, around 10-20 lux. This is closer to twilight, the darkness when the sun is just below the horizon. Chickens have worse vision at low light levels than humans, so having enough light to see well is incredibly important for their welfare.
Producers often keep light levels low so that chickens are less motivated to move around. The more a chicken moves, the more energy it spends on exercise instead of on gaining weight – this cuts into producer profits.
It’s also important that chickens have a long, continuous period of darkness to rest properly. It’s harder to get proper rest when there isn’t proper darkness.
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Air quality is linked to ventilation and the cleanliness of the living environment. Good air quality should be a given in any housing environment.
Chicken droppings produce ammonia gas. If the litter they fall on is allowed to get wet, bacteria growth creates even more ammonia. High levels of ammonia and carbon dioxide can sting the eyes and make it painful to breathe and are often an indicator of other welfare problems. Ammonia can even cause skin burns.
Carbon dioxide levels get too high when there isn’t enough ventilation. Air needs to be able to move through the sheds to and from the outside, so that carbon dioxide can’t build up in the enclosed space.
That’s why keeping the chickens’ living environment clean and dry is so important; otherwise, it becomes a health hazard.
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All animals have a long history of evolution behind them that got them to where they are today.
Our domestic chickens descended from the Red Junglefowl, which still live today in Southeast Asia. Junglefowl spend their life behaving much like backyard chickens. They scratch and peck in the leaf litter, bathe in dust regularly to keep their feathers in good condition, run around, flap their wings, and fly into the trees to escape predators or to roost off the ground at night. Domestic chickens still have these crucial survival behaviours in common with Red Junglefowl. They’ve been that way for many thousands of years. In fact, they’ve been that way for so long that any similar species of ground-dwelling bird will show the same behaviours.
We consider these core behavioural needs for chickens. Any chicken that has the opportunity to run, scratch, peck, perch, and take dust baths does so, even the breeds that have been selectively bred for commercial meat.
This is not just a matter of giving chickens the chance to do activities they like doing – it’s about behaviours that they need to do to stay healthy and happy. Chickens are highly motivated to roost and scratch and can become frustrated if they don’t have those opportunities. Which is why making their environment more varied and interesting by providing perches and objects to peck at is crucial for their welfare.
Image: We Animals Media
Slaughter
We expect the animals we eat to have a quick, painless death. For chickens, that requires minimal handling, and effective, reliable stunning before slaughter so the birds don’t experience any pain.
Unfortunately, current standard slaughter methods for chickens don’t meet this standard.
There are two ways that most chickens are stunned and slaughtered in Australia.
The first uses electrical stunning before the birds are killed by slitting their throats. The usual way to stun chickens for slaughter is to hang them upside down by their legs on hanging shackles and dip them into an electrified water bath. This is called live inversion.
Naturally, these chickens are terrified and often flap around trying to escape. As a result, they may receive pre-stun shocks from the electrified water bath. It’s also possible for them to move their heads out of reach of the water or so some chickens are still conscious when they’re moved through the rotating blade that kills them. Even then, the blade doesn’t reliably kill every bird, so a person with a knife spots any surviving birds and slit their throats by hand. This is a brutal, terrifying way to die.
The second slaughter method avoids these risks. Controlled atmosphere stunning uses gas to send birds unconscious. They are then either killed by gas or hung up while unconscious for slaughter. Just over half (55%) of producers in Australia use controlled atmosphere stunning. It would be a major welfare improvement if the majority did, as it’s a far less painful and stressful death.
The Better Chicken Commitment calls on chicken producers to switch to controlled atmosphere stunning, or effective electrical stunning without live inversion.
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Also referred to as partial depopulation, thinning is the practice of catching and removing some of the chickens from a shed. There are a few reasons why this happens. Producers often start out with an excess of chickens in a shed, who will eventually grow to a size that would exceed maximum legal stocking densities. Before they reach this stage, they will thin the flock and take a proportion of birds to slaughter early. Sometimes they will have specific contracts for purchasers who want smaller birds.
Thinning allows for maximum production from the available chicken shed space. However, thinning has serious welfare and health consequences. Sending teams of unfamiliar people into the shed to pick up birds can cause significant stress and injury. There is also a higher risk of illnesses (like coccidia and campylobacter) affecting the remaining birds, caused by interruptions to biosecurity protocols.
The Better Chicken Commitment discourages thinning, with a maximum of one thin per flock.
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.
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.
Help make life better for chickens
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.
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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.