Some people have so little empathy for chickens that they don’t care how they are treated. To call a person a ‘chicken’ is to show contempt for his lack of courage, and to call someone a ‘birdbrain’ is to suggest exceptional stupidity. But chickens can recognize up to 90 other individual chickens and know whether each one of those birds is higher or lower in the pecking order than they are themselves. Researchers have shown that if they get a small amount of food when they immediately peck at a colored button, but a larger amount if they wait 22 seconds, they can learn to wait before pecking.1 Moreover, after thousands of generations of domestic breeding, chickens still retain the ability to give and to understand distinct alarm calls, depending on whether there is a threat from above, like a hawk, or from the ground, like a raccoon. When scientists play back a recording of an ‘aerial’ alarm call, chickens respond differently than when they hear a recording of a ‘ground’ alarm call.2
Interesting as these studies are, the point of real ethical significance is not how clever chickens are, but whether they can suffer – and of that there can be no serious doubt. Chickens have nervous systems similar to ours, and when we do things to them that are likely to hurt a sensitive creature, they show behavioral and physiological responses that are like ours. When stressed or bored, chickens show what scientists call ‘stereotypical behavior,’ or repeated futile movements, like caged animals who pace back and forth. When they have become acquainted with two different habitats and find one preferable to the other, they will work hard to get to the living quarters they prefer. Lame chickens will choose food to which painkillers have been added; the drug evidently relieves the pain they feel and allows them to be more active.3
Most people readily agree that we should avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals. Summarizing the recent research on the mental lives of chickens and other farmed animals, Christine Nicol, professor of animal welfare at Bristol University, in England, has said: ‘Our challenge is to teach others that every animal we intend to eat or use is a complex individual, and to adjust our farming culture accordingly.’4 We are about to see how far that farming culture would have to change to achieve this.
Almost all the chickens sold in supermarkets – known in the industry as ‘broilers’ – are raised in very large sheds. A typical shed measures 490 feet long by 45 feet wide and will hold 30,000 or more chickens. The National Chicken Council, the trade association for the US chicken industry, issues Animal Welfare Guidelines that indicate a stocking density of 96 square inches for a bird of average market weight5 – that’s about the size of a standard sheet of American 8.5 inch × 11 inch typing paper. When the chicks are small, they are not crowded, but as they near market weight, they cover the floor completely – at first glance, it seems as if the shed is carpeted in white. They are unable to move without pushing through other birds, unable to stretch their wings at will, or to get away from more dominant, aggressive birds. The crowding causes stress, because in a more natural situation, chickens will establish a ‘pecking order’ and make their own space accordingly.
If the producers gave the chickens more space they would gain more weight and be less likely to die, but it isn’t the productivity of each bird – let alone the bird’s welfare – that determines how they are kept. As one industry manual explains: ‘Limiting the floor space gives poorer results on a per bird basis, yet the question has always been and continues to be: What is the least amount of floor space necessary per bird to produce the greatest return on investment.’6
In Britain, a judge ruled in 1997 that crowding chickens like this is cruel. The case arose when McDonald’s claimed that two British environmental activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, had libeled the company in a leaflet that, among other things, said that McDonald’s was responsible for cruelty. Steel and Morris had no money to pay lawyers to defend themselves against the corporate giant so they ran the case themselves, calling experts to give evidence in support of their claims. The ‘McLibel’ case turned into the longest trial in English legal history. After hearing many experts testify, the judge, Rodger Bell, ruled that, although some other claims Steel and Morris had made were false, the charge of cruelty was true: ‘Broiler chickens which are used to produce meat for McDonald’s . . . spend the last few days of their lives with very little room to move,’ he said. ‘The severe restriction of movement of those last few days is cruel and McDonald’s are culpably responsible for that cruel practice.’7
ENTER THE CHICKEN SHED (WARNING: MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME READERS)
Enter a typical chicken shed and you will experience a burning feeling in your eyes and your lungs. That’s the ammonia – it comes from the birds’ droppings, which are simply allowed to pile up on the floor without being cleaned out, not merely during the growing period of each flock, but typically for an entire year, and sometimes for several years.8 High ammonia levels give the birds chronic respiratory disease, sores on their feet and hocks, and breast blisters. It makes their eyes water, and when it is really bad, many birds go blind.9 As the birds, bred for extremely rapid growth, get heavier, it hurts them to keep standing up, so they spend much of their time sitting on the excrement-filled litter – hence the breast blisters.
Chickens have been bred over many generations to produce the maximum amount of meat in the least amount of time. They now grow three times as fast as chickens raised in the 1950s while consuming one-third as much feed.10 But this relentless pursuit of efficiency has come at a cost: their bone growth is outpaced by the growth of their muscles and fat. One study found that 90 percent of broilers had detectable leg problems, while 26 percent suffered chronic pain as a result of bone disease.11 Professor John Webster of the University of Bristol’s School of Veterinary Science has said: ‘Broilers are the only livestock that are in chronic pain for the last 20 percent of their lives. They don’t move around, not because they are overstocked, but because it hurts their joints so much.’12 Sometimes vertebrae snap, causing paralysis. Paralyzed birds or birds whose legs have collapsed cannot get to food or water, and – because the growers don’t bother to, or don’t have time to, check on individual birds – die of thirst or starvation. Given these and other welfare problems and the vast number of animals involved – nearly 9 billion in the United States – Webster regards industrial chicken production as, ‘in both magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.’13
Criticize industrial farming and industry spokes-people are sure to respond that it is in the interests of those who raise animals to keep them healthy and happy so that they will grow well. Commercial chicken-rearing conclusively refutes this claim. Birds who die prematurely may cost the grower money, but it is the total productivity of the shed that matters. G. Tom Tabler, who manages the Applied Broiler Research Unit at the University of Arkansas, and A. M. Mendenhall, of the Department of Poultry Science at the same university, have posed the question: ‘Is it more profitable to grow the biggest bird and have increased mortality due to heart attacks, ascites (another illness caused by fast growth), and leg problems, or should birds be grown slower so that birds are smaller, but have fewer heart, lung, and skeletal problems?’ Once such a question is asked, as the researchers themselves point out, it takes only ‘simple calculations’ to draw the conclusion that, depending on the various costs, often ‘it is better to get the weight and ignore the mortality.’14
Breeding chickens for rapid growth creates a different problem for the breeder birds, the parents of the chickens people eat. The parents have the same genetic characteristics as their offspring – including huge appetites. But the breeder birds must live to maturity and keep on breeding as long as possible. If they were given as much food as their appetites demand, they would grow grotesquely fat and might die before they became sexually mature. If they survived at all, they would be unable to breed. So breeder operators ration the breeder birds to eat 60 to 80 percent less than their appetites would lead them to eat if they could.15 The National Chicken Council’s Animal Welfare Guidelines refer to ‘off-feed days;’ that is, days on which the hungry birds get no food at all. This is liable to make them drink ‘excessive’ amounts of water, so the water, too, can be restricted on those days. They compulsively peck the ground, even when there is nothing there, either to relieve the stress, or in the vain hope of finding something to eat. As Mr Justice Bell, who examined this practice in the McLibel case, said: ‘My conclusion is that the practice of rearing breeders for appetite, that is to feel especially hungry, and then restricting their feed with the effect of keeping them hungry, is cruel. It is a well-planned device for profit at the expense of suffering of the birds.’
The fast-growing offspring of these breeding birds live for only six weeks. At that age they are caught, put into crates, and trucked to slaughter. A Washington Post journalist observed the catchers at work: ‘They grab birds by their legs, thrusting them like sacks of laundry into the cages, sometimes applying a shove.’ To do their job more quickly, the catchers pick up only one leg of each bird, so that they can hold four or five chickens in each hand. (The National Chicken Council’s Animal Welfare Guidelines, eager to avoid curtailing any practice that may be economically advantageous, says ‘The maximum number of birds per hand is five.’) Dangling from one leg, the frightened birds flap and writhe and often suffer dislocated and broken hips, broken wings, and internal bleeding.16
Crammed into cages, the birds then travel to the slaughterhouse, a journey that can take several hours. When their turn to be removed from the crates finally comes, their feet are snapped into metal shackles hanging from a conveyor belt that moves towards the killing room. Speed is the essence, because the slaughterhouse is paid by the number of pounds of chicken that comes out the end. Today a killing line typically moves at 90 birds a minute, and speeds can go as high as 120 birds a minute, or 7,200 an hour. Even the lower rate is twice as fast as the lines moved twenty years ago. At such speeds, even if the handlers wanted to handle the birds gently and with care, they just couldn’t.
In the United States, in contrast to other developed nations, the law does not require that chickens (or ducks, or turkeys) be rendered unconscious before they are slaughtered. As the birds move down the killing line, still upside down, their heads are dipped into an electrified water bath, which in the industry is called ‘the stunner.’ But this is a misnomer. Dr Mohan Raj, a researcher in the Department of Clinical Veterinary Science at the University of Bristol, in England, has recorded the brain activity of chickens after various forms of stunning and reported his results in such publications as World’s Poultry Science Journal. We asked him: ‘Can the American consumer be confident that broilers he or she buys in a supermarket have been properly stunned so that they are unconscious when they have their throats cut?’ His answer was clear: ‘No. The majority of broilers are likely to be conscious and suffer pain and distress at slaughter under the existing water bath electrical stunning systems.’ He went on to explain that the type of electrical current used in the stunning procedure was not adequate to make the birds immediately unconscious. Using a current that would produce immediate loss of consciousness, however, would risk damage to the quality of the meat. Since there is no legal requirement for stunning, the industry won’t take that risk. Instead, the inadequate current that is used evidently paralyzes the birds without rendering them unconscious. From the point of view of the slaughterhouse operator, inducing paralysis is as good as inducing unconsciousness, for it stops the birds from thrashing about and makes it easier to cut their throats.
Because of the fast line speed, even the throat-cutting that follows the electrified water bath misses some birds, and they then go alive and conscious into the next stage of the process, a tank of scalding water. It is difficult to get figures on how many birds are, in effect, boiled alive, but documents obtained under the Freedom of Information act indicate that in the United States alone, it could be as many as three million a year.17 At that rate, 11 chickens would have been scalded to death in the time it takes you to read this page. But the real figure might be much higher. An undercover videotape made at a Tyson slaughterhouse at Heflin, Alabama, shows dozens of birds who have been mutilated by throat-cutting machines that were not working properly. Workers rip the heads off live chickens that have been missed by the cutting blade. Conscious birds go into the scalding tank. A plant worker is recorded as saying that it is acceptable for 40 birds per shift to be missed by the backup killer and scalded alive.18
If you found the last few paragraphs unpleasant reading, Virgil Butler, who spent years working for Tyson Foods in the killing room of a slaughterhouse in Grannis, Arkansas, killing 80,000 chickens a night, mostly for Kentucky Fried Chicken, says that what we have described ‘doesn’t even come close to the horrors I have seen.’ The killing line on which he worked moved so quickly that it was impossible to kill all the chickens before the line moved on. On a good night, he says, about one in every seven of the chickens were alive when they went into the scalding tank. On an average night, it might be three chickens in every ten. The missed birds are, according to Butler, ‘scalded alive.’ They ‘flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads.’ Often they come out ‘with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they’ve struggled so much in the tank.’19 When there were mechanical failures, the supervisor would refuse to stop the line, even though he knew that chickens were going into the scalding tank alive or were having their legs broken by malfunctioning equipment.
When people are under pressure and angry with their boss or frustrated about their working conditions, they can do strange things. In January 2003, Butler made a public statement describing workers pulling chickens apart, stomping on them, beating them, running over them on purpose with a fork-lift truck, and even blowing them up with dry ice ‘bombs.’ Tyson dismissed the statement as the ‘outrageous’ inventions of a disgruntled worker who had lost his job.
It’s true that Butler has a conviction for burglary and has had other problems with the law. But eighteen months after Butler made these supposedly ‘outrageous’ claims, a videotape secretly filmed at another KFC-supplying slaughterhouse, in Moorfield, West Virginia, made his claims a lot more credible. The slaughterhouse, operated by Pilgrim’s Pride, the second largest chicken producer in the nation, had won KFC’s ‘Supplier of the Year’ Award. The tape, taken by an undercover investigator working for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, showed slaughterhouse workers behaving in ways quite similar to those described by Butler: slamming live chickens into walls, jumping up and down on them, and drop-kicking them as if they were footballs. The undercover investigator said that, beyond what he had been able to catch on camera, he had witnessed ‘hundreds’ of acts of cruelty. Workers had ripped off a bird’s head to write graffiti in blood, plucked feathers off live chickens to ‘make it snow,’ suffocated a chicken by tying a latex glove over its head, and squeezed birds like water balloons to spray feces over other birds. The investigator thought that the workers did this because they were bored or needed to vent their frustrations at the nature of the work. Evidently, their work had desensitized them to animal suffering.
The only significant difference between the behavior of the workers at Moorfield and that described by Butler at Grannis was that the behavior at Moorfield was caught on tape. Unable to dismiss the evidence of cruelty, Pilgrim’s Pride said that it was ‘appalled.’20 But neither Pilgrim’s Pride nor Tyson Foods, the two largest suppliers of chicken in America, have done anything to address the root cause of the problem: unskilled, low-paid workers doing dirty, bloody work, often in stifling heat, under constant pressure to keep the killing lines moving no matter what so that they can slaughter up to 90,000 animals every shift.
1.Jennifer Viegas, ‘Chickens worry about the future,’ Discovery News, https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/07/15/1415178.htm
2.Susan Milius, ‘The science of eeeeek: what a squeak can tell researchers about life, society, and all that,’ Science News, Sept 12, 1998; available at https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-21156998/the-science-of-eeeeek-what-asqueak-can-tell-researchers
3.T. C. Danbury et al., ‘Self-selection of the analgesic drug carprofen by lame broiler chickens,’ Veterinary Record, 146 (11 March 2000), pp. 307–11.
4.Jonathan Leake, ‘The Secret Lives of Moody Cows,’ Sunday Times, February 27, 2005.
5.National Chicken Council, Animal Welfare Guidelines and Audit Checklist, Washington, DC, March 2003, available at https://thepoultrysite.com/articles/animal-welfare-guidelines-and-audit-checklist. On p. 6 it is stated that ‘. . . density shall not exceed 8.5 pounds live weight per square foot.’ Since the average market weight in 2004 was 5 pounds (see www.nationalchickencouncil.com/statistics/stat_detail.cfm?id=2) this is equivalent to 85 square inches per bird.
6.M. O. North and Bell D. D., Commercial Chicken Production Manual, 4th edition (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990), p. 456.
7.John Vidal, McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial (London: Pan Books, 1997), p. 311.
8.See H. L. Brodie et al., ‘Structures for Broiler Litter Manure Storage,’ Fact Sheet 416, Maryland Cooperative Extension, www.agnr.umd.edu/users/bioreng/fs416.htm, refer, without any suggestion of criticism, to delaying manure cleanout for three years. See also Anon., ‘Animal Waste Management Plans,’ Delaware Nutrient Management Notes, Delaware Department of Agriculture, vol. 1, no. 7 (July 2000), where the calculations are based on 90 percent of the litter remaining in place for two years.
9.C. Berg, ‘Foot-Pad Dermatitis in Broilers and Turkeys,’ Veterinaria 36 (1998); G. J. Wang, C. Ekstrand, and J. Svedberg, ‘Wet Litter and Perches as Risk Factors for the Development of Foot Pad Dermatitis in Floor-Housed Hens,’ British Poultry Science 39 (1998), pp. 191–7; C. M. Wathes, ‘Aerial Emissions from Poultry Production,’ World Poultry Science Journal 54 (1998), pp. 241–51; Kristensen and Wathes, op cit; S. Muirhead, ‘Ammonia Control Essential to Maintenance of Poultry Health,’ Feedstuffs (April 13, 1992), p. 11. On blindness caused by ammonia, see also Michael P. Lacy, ‘Litter Quality and Performance,’ University of Georgia College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, https://thepoultrysite.com/articles/litter-quality-and-broiler-performance and Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry, (Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company, 1996), pp. 62–4, 92, 96–8.
10.G. Havenstein, P. Ferket, and M. Qureshi, ‘Growth, livability, and feed conversion of 1957 versus 2001 broilers when fed representative 1957 and 2001 broiler diets,’ Poultry Science 82 (2003), pp. 1500–1508.
11.S. C. Kestin, T. G. Knowles, A. E. Tinch, and N. G. Gregory, ‘Prevalence of Leg Weakness in Broiler Chickens and its Relationship with Genotype,’ Veterinary Record 131 (1992), pp. 190–9.
12.Quoted in the Guardian, October 14, 1991.
13.John Webster, Animal Welfare: A Cool Eye Towards Eden (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1995), p. 156.
14.G. T. Tabler and A. M. Mendenhall, ‘Broiler Nutrition, Feed Intake and Grower Economics,’ Avian Advice 5(4) (Winter 2003), p. 9.
15.J. Mench, ‘Broiler breeders: feed restriction and welfare,’ World’s Poultry Science Journal, vol. 58 (2002), pp. 23–9.
16.I. J. H. Duncan, ‘The Assessment of Welfare During the Handling and Transport of Broilers,’ in J. M. Faure and A. D. Mills (eds.), Proceedings of the Third European Symposium on Poultry Welfare (Tours, France: French Branch of the World Poultry Science Association, 1989), pp. 79–91; N. G. Gregory and L. J. Wilkins, ‘Skeletal Damage and Bone Defects During Catching and Processing,’ in Bone Biology and Skeletal Disorders in Poultry. C. C. Whitehead, ed. (Abingdon, England: Carfax Publishing, 1992). Cited from A COK Report: Animal Suffering in the Broiler Industry.
17.Freedom of Information Act #94–363, Poultry Slaughtered, Condemned, and Cadavers, 6/30/94; cited in United Poultry Concerns, ‘Poultry Slaughter: The Need for Legislation’, http://www.upc-online.org/slaughter/slaughter3web.pdf.
18.‘Tyson to Probe Chicken-slaughter Methods,’ Associated Press, May 25, 2005.
19.Signed statement of Tyson employee Virgil Butler, January 30, 2003.
20.Donald G. McNeil Jr, ‘KFC Supplier Accused of Animal Cruelty,’ New York Times, July 20, 2004.