10 facts about chicken farming that will make your stomach turn.

The treatment of chickens who are used for their meat – known as ‘broiler’ chickens – is one of the biggest animal welfare issues in the world today. In Australia alone, over 1.5 million chickens are killed every single day.

To meet consumer demand and turn a profit, these sensitive animals have been bred only to suffer short, painful lives.

Here are a few things the chicken meat industry would prefer you didn’t know…

Broiler chickens have been bred to grow at an unnaturally fast rate. Their heavy bodies, coupled with crowded living conditions, mean they often suffer a myriad of problems including lameness, respiratory issues, heart problems, disease, chemical burns on their bodies and feet, infections, and of course, death.

In 2018, a customer who bought chicken breast from a supermarket in Victoria was shocked to discover green flesh (pictured below right). This is known as Deep Pectoral Myopathy (DPM) or green muscle disease and can be caused by the unnaturally rapid growth rate broiler chickens are forced to undergo. The green flesh is usually cut out during meat processing, or the meat ‘downgraded’.

Chickens are well-known for being talkative, and scientists have identified over 24 distinct noises that adult chickens use to communicate different things, such as danger or food and how they are feeling. A hen will even start communicating with her chicks while they’re still in the egg, so the chicks get to know the sound of her voice.

But meat chickens have been selectively bred to grow so big so fast that they reach slaughter weight at just 35 days old – when they are still ‘cheeping’ and long before they learn to cluck, growl, murmur, coo or develop their own ‘egg song’.

In Australian factory farms, it’s legal to keep tens of thousands of chickens in a single shed. From the time they’re put there as tiny chicks to the day they’re caught and killed, the litter under them will not be cleaned. Because bird waste is acidic, this build-up of ammonia can then cause painful burns on their bodies. A build-up of ammonia can make it difficult for a person to breathe within only a few minutes – imagine what it must be like for those chickens who have to live their whole lives in there…

In Australia and across the globe, entire sheds of chickens can be dosed with antibiotics as a ‘preventative measure’, at a time when antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to public health. Our recent investigation uncovered dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria on chicken (and pig) meat sold in Australian supermarkets – confirming that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are being produced as an inherent by-product of factory farming.

Concerningly, despite the risks ‘superbugs’ pose to all humankind, Australia has no reporting requirements in place on the industry’s use of antibiotics. But when a farming system requires tens of thousands of animals to be dosed up on antibiotics in an effort to stem the outbreak of disease, it is clear that we don’t just need reporting requirements – the system itself needs to change for both the animals and the safety of humans.

And it does. It’s pretty damning that the ‘farming’ system implemented by the intensive chicken meat industry results in the death of millions of chickens in the sheds each year – chickens who don’t even make it to 35 days old when they reach ‘slaughter weight’.

In the pursuit of profit, the intensive chicken meat industry has condemned millions of chickens to suffer greatly; particularly those who have to cope with painful and debilitating lameness. Their bodies become so large, so quickly, that many die from respiratory and heart problems, or from not being able to walk to food and water.

There’s nothing quite as unhygienic as a shed jam-packed with sick chickens living in their own filth – so once the birds are killed, their bodies are often washed with chlorine. Chlorine is widely used in the industry to get rid of the nasties like E. Coli, salmonella and campylobacter, which can make people seriously ill.

Shortly after chicks in the meat industry hatch, they’re ‘sorted’ into groups — ‘viable’ and ‘unviable’. While the former will be condemned to a short life (most likely in a factory farm) the latter are considered ‘worthless’. Millions of tiny chicks who fall into this category are killed by either gassing or being dropped into a ‘maceration’ machine and ground up alive. This is just the ‘cost of doing business’ for the chicken meat industry (and the egg industry too) – and this practice is entirely legal in Australia.

The Farm Transparency Project and Animal Liberation NSW captured this brutal practice for the first time inside an Australian hatchery. You can learn more about it here.

The Free Range Egg and Poultry Association requirements state that birds must be given access to the outdoors from 3 weeks old – but as they will be killed between 4-6 weeks old, ‘free range’ chickens may only have access to the outdoors for one week of their lives (and often 3 weeks at most!).

Many people are surprised to learn that the term ‘free-range’ has no legal definition, so standards can vary enormously. Even in the ‘best’ free-range systems, chickens are usually genetically the same; they are bred to grow at an unnatural rate and thus are prone to many of the same health issues as those raised in factory farms.

The risks from chicken meat are not limited to direct consumption. When thousands or tens of thousands of animals are crammed together in factory farms, they generate substantial waste. When not properly managed, this waste can lead to bacteria (faecal coliforms) being pumped into the environment. When it rains, runoff can worsen the effluent pollution problem, and even without rain, ammonia released from chicken waste can vaporise into the air, later settling on and degrading the water and soil quality of surrounding areas.

Regardless of what system a chicken was raised in – factory farm, barn, or ‘free-range’ – the slaughter process they face is the same. Once these young birds reach ‘slaughter weight’, chicken catchers will grab them by their legs, stuff them into plastic crates, and transport them in all weather conditions to the slaughterhouse. They will all endure the same fear of being restrained, ‘stunned’, and killed. 

Some abattoirs will use gas chambers to kill the birds, and at other slaughterhouses, an electrified bath is used to ‘stun’ the animals before their throats are cut. Many chickens may arrive with dislocated hips and fractures only to be strung up painfully by their legs and forced to hang upside-down in metal stirrups, as a conveyor belt carries them through the bath, and towards an automated knife. And that’s when things go ‘well’. You can learn more about how chickens and other animals are slaughtered in Australia here.

As consumer demand has created our current food system where chickens are treated this way, it is consumer demand that can shift towards kinder alternatives.

Every time you choose to leave chickens off your plate and opt for animal-friendly food, you are helping pave the way to a more compassionate world for chickens – a world where they are seen for who they are, instead what their bodies can produce. And these days, eating more kindly is easier than ever!

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Special thanks to Tamara Kenneally Photography, The Farm Transparency Project and Anonymous for Animal Rights for some of the images used in this feature.